A Conceptual and Textological Study of A.A. Ukhtomsky’s Dissertation The Cosmological Proof of the Existence of God

Any research work with texts involves advancing and refining results as new archives and documents are discovered. In the spring of 2025, a fair-copy manu­script of the candidate theological dissertation “The Cosmological Proof of the Existence of God” by the well-known Russian physiologist and philosopher Alexey Alekseevich Ukhtomsky was discovered in the archive of the Moscow Theological Academy. Work on Ukhtomsky’s dissertation text has a long history. Long before this discovery of the fair-copy version in the archive of the Moscow Theological Academy, a manuscript text without a title and with the author’s notes in the margins was found in Ukhtomsky’s archive, which researchers iden­tified as the “draft” version of the candidate dissertation. This text was published twice, in 1997 and 2015. The current article presents the results of a conceptual and textological analysis of the text from the archive of the Moscow Theological Academy in comparison with three previously known versions of this text: 1) the manuscript version from Ukhtomsky’s archive, 2) the text published in 1997, and 3) the text republished in 2015. The authors identify the discrepan­cies among these texts and pay special attention to Ukhtomsky’s notes, in which he substantiates his judgments about the existence of God, drawing on the histo­rical experience of the global intellectual tradition. Such an approach allows for a deeper understanding of the substantive significance of this text for clarifying Ukhtomsky’s intellectual trajectory on the one hand, and for actualizing his con­ceptual positions and “sphere of conversation” with “Deserved interlocutors” in the context of contemporary science and philosophy, on the other.