On ancient and Byzantine parallels to modern Russian logical-semantic theories

In the article we analyze the growth and making of Nina D. Arutyunova’s logical theory of identity and similarity, which was connected with her appropriation of W. O. Quine’s theory of natural kinds and, at a more profound level, with Porphyry’s ideas on the five basic predicabilia. We also study Elena V. Paducheva’s theory of communication, which we propose to see as a part of a more comprehensive “Austin - Gadamer - Paducheva theory”, due to the consonance in ideas between all the three thinkers, and add a few words about typological repercussions between Paducheva and the 14th-century Byzantine philosopher Theodore Metochites. Nina D. Arutyunova has managed to largely overcome Porphyry’s nominalist stance by teaching about the real being of the singular, i.e., of a personality, both in the world and in art, which being is unique in both cases. As an additional premise and precondition of her thought we single out the refutation on the part of the Byzantine adherents of Porphyry of the notion of private essence as the one disconcerting ontology and undermining the reality of instantiation of general, to wit, generic and specific features, together with an essence itself, in the singular. Those speculations by Paducheva and Arutyunova, developed in the 1980s and ‘90s can be seen as a graphic example of a renewal of Aristotelianism in the contemporary Russian philosophy. Arutyunova’s immediate precursor was Fr. Pavel Florensky. In his The Pillar and Foundation of the Truth he criticized the rigid essentialism of the late Western Scholasticism represented by Fransisco Suarez, S.J., in a fashion similar to Porphyry’s. Arutyunova’s works indoctrinate their readers into her theory of personality as a spiritual and intentional notion that cannot be exhaustively described using the sum of its external predications.