V.K.: Vladislav Aleksandrovich, you have come a long way in your scientific career: from a student of the class of 1955 in the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University to a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the sector of the theory of knowledge and head of the division of epistemology and logic at the Institute of Philosophy of the RAS, and editor in chief of our country's leading philosophy journal Voprosy filosofii. Your field of research (...) is the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science or, to be more specific, the cultural-historical analysis of knowledge from the point of view of the activity approach. As far as I know, the psychological aspect of the activity approach to the study of consciousness and knowledge was developed by the psychologists Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, his student Aleksei Nikolaevich Leontiev, Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, and Petr Iakovlevich Galperin. Leontiev, Luria, and Galperin were professors at the Philosophy Faculty of MGU at the time you were studying there. Tell me, did you develop your scientific interests under the influence of the Moscow school of cultural-historical psychology? (shrink)

A large team of well-known Soviet scholars is currently preparing a new textbook in philosophy. We thought it might be useful to acquaint the broad philosophical public with the ideas that guided the authors in writing the textbook, and have included its table of contents, preface, and conclusion. We also, together with the team of authors, are hoping for readers' responses. The book will be published shortly by Politizdat Publishers.

This concise history of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences includes discussion of the main periods of its development, its research problematic, and changes that have occurred in the life and work of the institute over the past two decades.

The principal fact that strikes the eye upon study of the present state of analytical philosophy is that virtually all its spokesmen share the belief that logical positivism, once the most influential of the analytical currents, is on the decline. The present-day philosophy of analysis is regarded as a kind of "post-positivism.".

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. (shrink)

UNESCO has declared 1996 to be the year of tolerance. The issue of tolerance has been discussed at a number of conferences, seminars, and symposia both in our country and abroad. I have participated in some of these discussions and would like to share some thoughts on this problem. But first let me call attention to a number of points that will become clearer later on. First, the idea of tolerance is in reality not as simple as it seems, because (...) it proceeds from certain premises and entails a number of conclusions. Moreover, it may be understood in different ways leading to different results. Most importantly, this seemingly limited, although practically important issue is associated with a number of fundamental philosophical questions bearing on our understanding of man and his identity, the possibilities and limits of cognition and mutual understanding, and so forth. (shrink)

A cognitive relation presumes the presence of two terms: the subject and the object. The process of cognition can be realized only in forms characteristic of the subject. However, cognition faces the task of reproducing the properties of the object "in itself," and not in its relation to any given "point of view" of the subject. Lenin singles out objectivity of examination as the first, the starting element in scientific dialectics . This is also testified to by the very meaning (...) of the concept "knowledge": one can only know something that is outside knowledge; knowledge points to some external reality. This is confirmed by the very nature of sensorily elementary forms of cognition: "The luminous effect of any thing upon the optic nerve is perceived not as the subjective stimulus of the optic nerve itself, but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye" . In activity in the realm of scientific theory, the principle of objective reproduction of an object is formulated as a conscious methodological requirement. But are there rationally formulable criteria permitting the discrimination of objective knowledge from all sorts of subjective psychological forms ? (shrink)

In the not-too-distant past, the activity approach was quite popular in Russian philosophy and in many human sciences, including psychology. Recently it has come under criticism, even from some of its former proponents. This issue begins a series of articles devoted to assessing the results of research that has been conducted in Russia along the lines of this approach. The authors of the articles are philosophers, psychologists, and educational theoreticians and practitioners.

A retrospective look at the development of philosophy in Russia in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods through the prism of the author's own fifty-year experience with philosophical research and its organization within and beyond the institutional establishment. Recognizing the significance of the accumulated philosophical riches, the author advocates for not merely preserving and multiplying those riches, but also for making them available to the society and establishing active collaboration with researchers in other disciplines as well as with cultural and religious (...) leaders. (shrink)

Our journal is now a half century old. ... For those who have been associated with Voprosy filosofii all these years the time, it seems, has passed quickly. I remember how we celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal and the plans we made then. It seems that all this happened quite recently. But if one now recalls what happened with our journal and our philosophy in general during these years, one gets the uncanny feeling that we have lived through (...) several lives with Voprosy filosofii, very intense and dramatic lives, each continuing the preceding one and at the same time somehow quite different from it. (shrink)