- Preface by Eero Tarasti Introduction: Experience as a Subject of Philosophy in the Early Twentieth Century
- Chapter 1: Sesemann's Life and Work
- Chapter 2: Neo-Kantianism, Formalism, and the Question of Being
- Chapter 3: New Approaches to the Psychic Subject: Vasilij Sesemann, Bakhtin and Lacan
- Chapter 4: Intuition and Ontology in Vasilij Sesemann and Bergson: Zeno's Paradox and the Being of Dream
- Appendix I: V. Sesemann: Socrates and the Problem of Self-Perception (excerpts) trans. T. Botz-Bornstein
- Appendix II: V. Sesemann: "On the Nature of the Poetic Form" (excerpts) trans. T. Botz-Bornstein
- Appendix III: L.P. Karsavin: The Foundations of Politics (excerpts) trans. T. Botz Bornstein
- Appendix IV: A Letter by Henri Parland from Kaunas
- Appendix V: Research Bibliography of Sesemann's Works Bibliography Index.
- (source: Nielsen Book Data)
Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920s until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labor camp from 1950 to 1956). Botz-Bornstein's study takes up Sesemann's idea of experience as a dynamic, constantly self-reflective, ungraspable phenomenon that cannot be objectified. Through various studies, the author shows how Sesemann develops an outstanding idea of experience by reflecting it against empathy, Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge), Formalism, Neo-Kantianism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Bergson's philosophy. Sesemann's thought establishes a link between Formalist thoughts about dynamics and a concept of Being reminiscent of Heidegger. The book contains also translations of two essays by Sesemann as well as of an essay by Karsavin.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
