Krakow is the place of meetings. Here the East unites with the West, Christianity merges with culture, faith combines with reason. Since 2010 The Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow together with some other institutions organizes annual conferences on Russian philosophy. Each year our conferences bring together many scholars from Poland, USA, Italy, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and many other countries.
The result of the Krakow Meetings a number of books published in English, Polish and Russian. In 2015 we launched a book series Ex Oriente Lux: New Perspectives on Russian Religious Philosophers issued by Wipf and Stock Publishers in the United States. In 2017–2019 the Committee on Philosophical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences (KNF PAN) assumed the honorary patronage over the Krakow Meetings.
Ex oriente lux
We believe that Russian religious philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has great importance for Christian theology and philosophy. Russian thinkers, rooted in the tradition of the Church Fathers, strove for an integral knowledge of reality, based on the unity of faith and reason. Such philosophers and theologians as Peter Chaadaev, Alexei Khomiakov, Vladimir Soloviev, Evgenii Trubetskoi, Pavel Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Georges Florovsky, and Aleksei Losev had penetrating insight into the nature of reality and thought deeply about religion and culture, science and philosophy, and history and society. Their legacy deserves a prominent place in contemporary philosophical and theological discussions.
The series Ex Oriente Lux aims to meet this need. It serves as a way to bring Eastern Christian intuitions into the current post-secular philosophical and theological context. Each volume focuses on one Russian thinker and includes a selection of essays on the thinker’s main ideas in historical and contemporary contexts. The books are prepared by Western and Russian scholars, thus creating a space for intellectual dialogue.
The series comes out of research connected with the annual conferences on Russian religious philosophy held in Krakow, Poland. The “Krakow Meetings” are organized by the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow and other institutions.
