Unlike the previous four volumes, which were based on articles translated from French (albeit with substantial additions by Ukrainian authors), this volume consists entirely of texts written in Ukraine. However, the translation process will now proceed in the reverse direction: preliminary plans already exist for publishing the materials of this fifth volume in English and German.
The foundational idea of the European Journal of Philosophy (ЄСФ) is the language-dependence of any philosophical reflection. It is precisely for this reason that, according to the initiators of the ЄСФ, every language contains certain unique resources for shaping philosophical thought that are inaccessible in other languages and untranslatable by means of other languages (although it is, of course, possible to describe them in another language; the question remains how artificial or counter-intuitive such a description will appear to native speakers of the original language).
Paradoxically, this idea of the language-dependence of all reflection has been familiar to European philologists since at least the time of Wilhelm von Humboldt (first third of the 19th century), and in our region since the mid-19th century (more precisely, since the 1862 publication of the study by the Kharkiv professor Oleksandr Potebnia, Thought and Language). From that time onward, the thesis that language does not merely “formulate” a ready-made thought but rather shapes it—so that the resulting product, including any concept, is a consequence of the interaction between pre-linguistic intuitions and the specific language together with its available expressive resources—has become commonplace in philology.
It would seem that the conclusion regarding the unique worldview resources present in every language follows directly from this, without any additional reasoning. However, as far as I am aware, this idea reached the practice of translating philosophical texts only in the 1980s (and even then only as isolated exceptions). In 20th-century philosophy proper, it first gave rise to the notion of the exclusive status of certain “chosen” languages, which were supposedly the only ones in which it was possible to philosophize (for Heidegger, these were two: Ancient Greek and German). It was not until the 1990s that the idea finally assumed the form we encounter in the ЄСФ.
This is an instructive example of how slowly knowledge spreads, even between very closely related fields of research.