Bücher der Reihe Sovietica

Millions of jubilant Soviet citizens crowded the squares and streets of Kiev and Minsk during the May Day festivities. A popular Soviet author wrote a year later in the Soviet media: "Chernobyl appeared to be not only a national event, a disaster shared by each of us, but also a dividing line between two eras of time.

This study seeks to present the theory of freedom as found in one line of the Marxist tradition, that which begins with Marx and Engels and continues through Lenin to contemporary Soviet philosophy.

At the end of the nineteenth century he was the leader in putting Russian progressive culture in touch with Western Marxism, breaking away from Populism and, at the same time, resuming materialistic tradition within Russian progressive thought.

"I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context. III John Dewey " . . . philosophers do not grow like mushrooms, out of the earth; they are the outgrowth of their period, their nation, whose most subtle, delicate and invisible juices abound in the philosophical ideas. ,,2 Karl Marx Few issues are more heatedly debated in contemporary philosophy circles than that of con textual ism vs. foundationalism. The genesis for the debate was the publication in 1979 of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which announ~ed the death of traditional philosophy. By "traditional" here is meant the quest for a certain or apodictic bedrock upon which an overall general theory or schema might be erected. This approach, for Rorty, characterized most previous philosophy, but especially the era from Descartes to Kant. Further, the three major philosophic thinkers of the 20th century, Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, each initially tried to construct a foundational philosophy but each of the three, in his later work, broke free of the Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational, and spent his time warning us against those very temptations to which he himself had once succumbed. Thus their later work is therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than to 3 supply him with a new philosophical program.

With this in mind the reader will be taken through three meta-theoretical levels of Marx' method of analysis of the struc tures of capitalism: (1) the clarification of 'critique' and method from Kant's epistemology, Hegel's phenomenology, to Marx' political economy (Chapter One);

Before this one, however, Birjukov published another study on Frege: 'On Frege's Works on Philosophical Problems of Mathe matics' in the collective volume Philosophical Questions of Natural Sciences 7, published in a printing of 8000 copies by the Moscow University Press.

The present work is a study of the method of contemporary Soviet philosophy. By "Soviet philosophy" we mean philosophy as published in the Soviet Union. For practical purposes we have limited our attention to Soviet sources in Russian in spite of the fact that Soviet philosophical works are also published in other languages (see B 2029(21)(38".

The year 1979 ushered in a new phase in China's long and continuous revolu- tion.

In the process of an experiment on blood transfusion, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovsky, better known as Bogdanov, had exchanged his blood with that of a critically ill malaria victim in hopes of saving both the patient and his blood.

As this century nears an end, it has become increasingly clear that Georg Lukacs is one of the most ta.1ented intellectuals of our time, not only in the Marxist tradition, but in general.

In this year of bicentennial celebration, there will no doubt take place several cultural analyses of the American tradition. That country also came relatively late onto the cultural horizon, and was not privy to the Renaissance tradition.

Papers presented at the First International Slavic Conference held in Banff, Alberta, Canada on September 4-7, 1974

GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEMATIC This study is devoted to an examination of a concept of crucial significance for Soviet aesthetics - the concept of the aesthetic (esteticeskoe).

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.

Contemporary philosophy is by its nature pluralistic, to a perhaps greater extent than at any moment of the preceding tradition, in that there are multiple forms of thought competing for a position on the center of the philosophic stage.

In recent writings on Marx one finds an increasing interest in his humanism. Lukacs, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), was one of the first to discover this new Marx, and he did so even before the most important 2 of the humanistic writings of the young Marx had been discovered.

A fair amount of important literature is being translated into English, but I believe it will be read main ly by specialists in Russian studies, or by those who have a great interest in the subject already. The majority of Russian authors write, of course, for the Russian reader or for an imagined Western public.

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.