Soviet philosophy of science - dialectical materialism - is an area of intellectual endeavor that engages thousands of specialists in the Soviet Union but passes almost entirely unnoticed in the West. It is true that a few Western authors have examined Soviet discussions of individual problems in philosophy of science, such as philosophical issues of biology, or psychology; nonetheless, no one else in the last twenty-five years has tried to study in detail the relationship of dialectical materialism to Soviet science as a whole. It is an unusual experience, rewarding yet worrisome, to be the only scholar making this endeavor.

Originally published in 1952. This book collects numerous works on the revival of Spinoza scholarship in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 30's, including the emergence of conflicting Marxist schools of Spinoza interpretation. This work includes translations by Kline of seven major articles on Spinoza published from 1923-1932, with a lengthy introduction providing contextual references. These developments were generally unknown outside of Russia due to lack of prior translations into a Western European language. The Marxist view of Spinoza represents a break not only with the dominant traditions of Western scholarship, but also with those critical and negative views of pre-Revolutionary Russia. This book provides both the study of Spinoza in Soviet philosophy, and of Soviet philosophy through Spinoza.

A critical study of the philosophical culture of the USSR.

This work is intended as an introduction to the study of Soviet psy chology. In it we have tried to present the main lines of Soviet psycho logical theory, in particular, the philosophical principles on which that theory is founded. There are surprisingly few books in English on Soviet psychology, or, indeed, in any Western European language. The works that exist usually take the form of symposia or are collections of articles translated from Soviet periodicals. The most important of these are Psychology in the Soviet Union (ed. by Brian Simon), Recent Soviet Psychology (ed. by Neil O'Connor) and Soviet Psychology, A Symposium (ed. by Ralf Winn). Raymond Bauer has also edited an interesting symposium entitled Some Views on Soviet Psychology. Only two systematic studies of Soviet psychology have been published to date: Joseph Wortis' Soviet Psychiatry and Raymond Bauer's The New Man in Soviet Psychology. Both are valuable introductions to Soviet psychology; Bauer's book, in particular, gives a good account of the debates on psychological theory in the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties and -thirties. Both, however, are somewhat out of date. There are also a number of interesting articles written by Ivan D. London and Gregory Razran, which give general surveys of particular periods or aspects of Soviet psychology. These have been listed in the bibliography.

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.