Alexander Piatigorsky: Buddhism as Object and Approach
Alexander Piatigorsky: Buddhism as Object and Approach

Summary/Abstract: Alexander Moseevich Piagitorsky (1929–2009) was a philosopher, linguist, scholar of Tamil literature and Buddhist thought, and fiction writer. His wideranging work is situated across several genres, from scholarly studies to philosophical novels, and addresses an expansive array of topics, including Buddhist philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, semiotics, and literary theory, as well as more episodic works on totalitarianism, psychoanalysis, and Russian literature. Piatigorsky was a faculty member at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) from his emigration in the mid-1970s until his death in 2009, making him one of few late-Soviet philosophers with a substantial publication output in English. And yet there is still relatively little secondary scholarship on Piatigorsky written in any language, further adding to the challenge of interpreting his already difficult body of work. Though he lived in the U.K. for over three decades, after his death The Guardian published an obituary saying that few of his SOAS colleagues “would have guessed that this was a man who was widely considered to be one of the more significant thinkers of the age and Russia’s greatest philosopher.” Piatigorsky was indeed part of a prolific group of philosophers who came of intellectual age in the post-Stalin years, but like many émigré thinkers of that era, his transnational status meant that his work has been understudied both in Russia and abroad.

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