National philosophy as a research topic in relation to Ukraine has its peculiar features. The national philosophy, in this case, cannot signify only Ukrainian philosophy, strictly ethnically limited (meeting either geographic or mental criteria). This entails an inevitable question of delimitation between Russian and Ukrainian philosophies. The only way to solve this unavoidable question is to recognize the duality of national consciousness as well as cultural parallelism, suggested by V. Zenkovsky for solving problems in relationships between Russia and Ukraine.

The idea of national philosophy is often expanded to ancient doctrines and problems. This is inappropriate but possible due to a number of clichés in contemporary understanding of philosophy, such as the reduction of philosophy to life experience and identification of philosophy with journalism and ideology. The author presents several arguments against these positions basing on various texts of early Ionian thinkers, Aristotle, Isocrates, Gorgias. Philosophy in Ancient Greece was understood as a critical practice of reasonable debates that implied a commitment to specific school or position and conscientious civil position of the philosopher. It was classic Greece where this understanding of philosophy formed as a combination of three conditions: citizen’s virtue → rhetorician’s persuasiveness → philosopher’s best knowledge (i.e., truth), that accompanied philosophy for the last 25 centuries. On that ground any discussion of national philosophy (Russian, Nenets, Bantu etc.) will be correct only if all of these conditions would be realized in any discourse, and this discourse would correspond to specific disciplinary features mentioned above.

In order to speak seriously about the emergence of national philosophy, it is necessary to consider not only the content of available texts that belong to a certain period, but also the ability of society to create and adequately perceive them. The article shows how in the Russian mediaeval national consciousness certain themes were elaborated, in particular the themes of "pravda" and "volya", which later in the XIX century determined not only the main direction of the national philosophizing, but also its genre diversity.

The article analyses the use of the idea and notion of national philosophy in the studies of the history of Ukrainian philosophy. Particularly, studying the writings of Dmytro Chyzhevskyi and Vilen Horskyi, there were analysed problems of applying the descriptive strategy in this field. The strategy consists in finding phenomena in the history of philosophy which could correspond to the notion of national philosophy. The institutional approach is put forward as an approach which can unite various phenomena, making up the contemporary canon of the history of philosophy of Ukraine. The proposed approach supplements and deepens a cultural approach, suggested by Vilen Horskyi, with the application of methods of social philosophy. It consists in study into national philosophical traditions as institutions which allow forming and interconnection between different modes of philosophizing within a national culture.

The word and idea of a «national philosophy» come up against a seemingly insurmountable aporia between the demand for a universal wisdom (philosophia perennis) and the need to incarnate this pursuit in the manifold and varied cultures.This aporia is mythically revealed in the conflict between the unified, solid, senseless language of Babel and its redemption in the shared understanding by different peoples and idioms (Pentecost).This myth finds its effective incarnation in the multiplicity of human cultures along human history. But this history is marked by a double conflict:- a symbolic one in the competition between a «vertical» order (the rule of languages considered to be sacred) and a «horizontal» order challenged by the outcome of new secular idioms (Volgare in Italy of Renaissance);- a polemical one in the recurrence of the tension between the building of a «lingua universalis» (a logical one) and the fertility of «natural» idioms. (at the epicenter of this tension radiates thought of Leibniz).What emerges from these oppositions is the part played by language, in the diversity of its expressions. This diversity enables the emergence of a «nationalization» of philosophy. From then on, it seeks and coins itself in the midst of fundamentally peculiar cultures (nations) competing in an inventive, contrasting and vulnerable quest for meaning.