Abstract

The article for the first time presents the powerful historical and philosophical potential of the collection of handwritten candidate works of Kyiv Theological Academy students, which is kept at Manuscript Institute, V. I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine. According to the analyzed manuscripts, despite the church-confessional and specialized theological orien-tation of the theological academies, as well as the system of rigid regulations and control by the Most Holy Synod in the subject matters and content of the final works, the students showed a persistent research interest in philosophy. The author identifies more than 150 candidate works of KTA students that are directly relevant to philosophical topics and issues. Most of them are research on the history of Western, Eastern and Russian philosophy. At the same time, the handwritten works available in the col-lection express the interest of students in the problems of epistemology, philosophy of history, social philosophy, axiology, ethics and aesthetics, philosophy of religion, as well as their attrac-tion to complex interdisciplinary studies, combining the issues of philosophy and history of phi-losophy with theology, psychology, pedagogy and literary studies.