Fundamentals. Keys to Cultural Code

Mikhail Naumovich Epstein – Russian-American philosopher, cultural scholar, literary critic, linguist, essayist, laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize, the London Institute of Social Inventions, the International Essay Competition (Berlin-Weimar), Liberty (New York). Professor at Emory University (USA), author of more than thirty books and over seven hundred articles and essays, translated into twenty-four foreign languages.
The book examines the fundamental concepts essential to the cultural code of any nation – a kind of anthropological universals, which at their core are not entirely abstract, and at the same time any unambiguous interpretation of them turns out to be incomplete (for example, it concerns death and immortality, life and love, power and the people, the real and the possible). The author aims to demonstrate the play of each concept, the richness of its meanings, its mental horizon, the diversity of contexts into which it can be integrated, for which the author draws on the broadest range of philosophical sources and provides numerous examples from literary fiction.