Problems of Sense, Significance, and Validity in the Work of Shpet and the Bakhtin Circle Craig Brandist The works of Gustav Shpet and the Bakhtin Circle (most notably Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Voloshinov) represent two of the most important episodes in the Rus- sian reception of the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy. Each recognized the paucity of systematized thought in Russian philosophy of the period and was dissat- isfied with the intuitive, even mystical manner with which language was understood. While nineteenth-century Russian philology reached considerable heights, philo - sophical reflections on language had developed largely within the bounds of Ortho- dox theology and this continued to shape the spirit of secular debates on language in the twentieth century and to endow linguistic terms with metaphysical connotations. This, combined with the strong ethical leanings of Russian philosophy, helped the seeds of German idealist philosophy find fertile ground. The result was that Russian philosophy of language often developed impressionistically and was always devoid of an elaborated theory of reference. However, the strong ontological impulses of Russian thought, which partly derived from Orthodoxy, often pulled discussions of cognition away from the identification of metaphysics and the theory of knowledge that constituted the neo-Kantian legacy and pushed Russian thinkers in a direction usually associated with Austrian philosophy. Instead of the neo-Kantian "conscious - ness in general," the Brentanian intentional consciousness became a central point of orientation for both Shpet and the Bakhtin Circle, but each sought to develop this phenomenological notion in different ways, the former remaining close to the Or- thodox heritage while the latter sought a hybrid of phenomenology and neo-Kantian idealism. Personal relations between members of the Bakhtin Circle and Shpet are lim- ited to the mid-1920s when the initiator of the Circle, Matvei Kagan, worked in the Philosophy Section of the State Academy of the Artistic Sciences (GAKhN: Gosu- darstvennaia Akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk) that Shpet directed. A champion of Marburg School Neo-Kantianism, Kagan regularly attended the section's research seminars (RGALI, f. 941 [GAKhN], op. 14, d. 14. 1. 69) where he was allied with 192