`Scientific history of philosophy' was one of the professional branches of Soviet philosophy, and a place where philosophical culture was preserved in an often hostile environment. Situated between the ideological exigencies of the Soviet system with its Marxist-Leninist `theoretical foundation' and the need for an objective account of philosophy's past, Soviet history of philosophy displays the characteristic features of Soviet philosophy as a whole, including a forceful reappearance of its Hegelian background. This book is the only Western monograph on this important part of Soviet philosophy, thus filling the last main gap in Western `Philosophical Sovietology'. At the same time, it offers the first survey of Soviet philosophy after the disappearance of the Soviet system itself, embarking on an historical and meta-philosophical investigation of Soviet philosophical culture. The book will be of interest to students of Soviet and Russian philosophy, historians of philosophy and specialists in Soviet studies.

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This book presents key works of Boris Hessen, outstanding Soviet philosopher of science, available here in English for the first time. Quality translations are accompanied by an editors' introduction and annotations. Boris Hessen is known in history of science circles for his “Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” presented in London (1931), which inspired new approaches in the West. As a philosopher and a physicist, he was tasked with developing a Marxist approach to science in the 1920s. He studied the history of physics to clarify issues such as reductionism and causality as they applied to new developments. With the philosophers called the “Dialecticians”, his debates with the opposing “Mechanists” on the issue of emergence are still worth studying and largely ignored in the many recent works on this subject. Taken as a whole, the book is a goldmine of insights into both the foundations of physics and Soviet history.

The great age of Russian philosophy spans the century between 1830 and 1930 - from the famous Slavophile-Westernizer controversy of the 1830s and 1840s, through the 'Silver Age' of Russian culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the formation of a Russian 'philosophical emigration' in the wake of the Russian Revolution. This volume is a major history and interpretation of Russian philosophy in this period. Eighteen chapters (plus a substantial introduction and afterword) discuss Russian philosophy's main figures, schools and controversies, while simultaneously pursuing a common central theme: the development of a distinctive Russian tradition of philosophical humanism focused on the defence of human dignity. As this volume shows, the century-long debate over the meaning and grounds of human dignity, freedom and the just society involved thinkers of all backgrounds and positions, transcending easy classification as 'religious' or 'secular'. The debate still resonates strongly today.