Mikhail Minakov, Alexander Shapiro and Luciano Mecacci


The Koine.Community continues conversations in the frameworks of the Koine.Debates.

The Koine.Community is a platform bringing the voices of philosophers to a wider audience. Freedom, solidarity, and humanity are the focus of our attention.

In the Koine.Debates we usually discuss philosophical topics. But today we have a conversation with the psychologists.

It took several generations for philosophers and psychologists to distance in the academic departments — at the end of 19th – beginning 0f 20th century. For Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Russel, psychologism was a highly negative term.

Yet now we are back to interdisciplinary dialogue. And it is the concept of experience in the focus of our conversation.

My today’s interlocutors are Prof. Shapiro and Prof. Mecacci.

Alexander Shapiro is an independent researcher (since January 2021), a psychologist, and a scholar working in the areas of theoretical psychology, personality psychology and other areas of psychology and psychotherapy. Alexander has over forty years of experience in research and teaching in Russia, Ukraine, the United States, Norway, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, and Croatia. He is the author and co-author of around 250 articles, has translated and has edited some professional (psychology) books. Now he is organizing The International Research Institute of Personality Experience and Positive Psycholingvistic.

Lucian Mecacci, past Professor of General Psychology at the University of Florence, has worked in the field of psychophysiology and history of psychology, especially the history of Russian (Soviet) psychology since his research stays in Moscow in the early ’70s at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology and the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Sciences. His last book on Besprizornye, the homeless children in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1935, was published in Italian in 2019 and will be translated into German and Russian.