Abstract

On the anniversary of Lenin's work of genius, the significance of this book for Marxist philosophy as a whole and, particularly, for the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge can be understood especially clearly. Turning today to the history of Marxist-Leninist thought in the twentieth century, we comprehend fully the enormous role played both by Lenin's defense of the principal propositions of dialectical materialism against revisionists and open enemies of Marxism dabbling in philosophy and his creative development of the underlying foundations of Marxist theory — those foundations that, in the final analysis, determine both the manner of posing and the method of resolving all other problems in Marxism, not just those of a theoretical nature but those of a practical political nature as well. Many questions elaborated in Lenin's work of genius acquire particular timeliness for Marxist-Leninist philosophy specifically at the present stage in the development of science and under current conditions in the ideological struggle. In the present article we shall deal with the significance of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism for the interpretation of certain pressing problems of the Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge