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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. The reasons for this
conceptual proliferation are numerous. But certainly one factor is
the increasing development of contemporary means of publication and
communication, which in turn make possible the rapid dissemination
of ideas as well as an informed reaction to them. And this in turn
has increased the possibility for serious philosophic exchange by
enhancing the available opportunities for the interaction of
competing forms of thought. But, although informed philosophic
interaction has in principle become increasingly possible in recent
years, the frequency, scope and quality of such discussion has
often been less than satisfactory. Contemporary philosophic
viewpoints tend not to interact in a Hegelian manner, as
complementary aspects of a totally satisfactory and a-perspectival
view, facets of a singly and all-embracing true position. Rather,
contemporary philosophic viewpoints tend to portray themselves as
mutually exclusive alternatives only occasionally willing to
acknowledge the possible validity or even the intrinsic interest of
other perspectives. Thus, although the multiplication of different
forms of philosophy in principle means that there are greater
possibilities for meaning ful exchange between them, in practice
the tendency of each of the various philosophic positions to raise
claims to philosophic truth from its point of view alone has had
the effect of impeding such interaction."
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science are devoted to
symposia, con gresses, colloquia, monographs and collected papers
on the philosophical foundations of the sciences. It is now our
pleasure to include A. A. Zi nov'ev's treatise on complex logic
among these volumes. Zinov'ev is one of the most creative of modern
Soviet logicians, and at the same time an innovative worker on the
methodological foundations of science. More over, Zinov'ev,
although still a developing scholar, has exerted a sub stantial and
stimulating influence upon his colleagues and students in Moscow
and within other philosophical and logical circles of the Soviet
Union. Hence it may be helpful, in bringing this present work to an
English-reading audience, to review briefly some contemporary
Soviet investigations into scientific methodology. During the
1950's, a vigorous new research program in logic was under taken,
and the initial published work -characteristic of most Soviet pub
lications in the logic and methodology of the sciences - was a
collection of essays, Logical Investigations (Moscow, 1959). Among
the authors, in addition to Zinov'ev himself, were the philosophers
A. Kol'man and P. V. Tavanec, and the mathematicians and linguists,
S. A. Janovskaja, A. S. Esenin-Vol'pin, S. K. Saumjan, G. N.
Povarov."
In this year of bicentennial celebration, there will no doubt take
place several cultural analyses of the American tradition. This is
only as it should be, for without an extensive, broad-based inquiry
into where we have come from, we shall surely not foresee where we
might go. Nonetheless, most cultural analyses of the American
context suffer from a common fault - the lack of a different
context to use for purposes of comparison. True, American values
and ideals were partly inherited from the European tradition. But
that tradition is in many ways an inadequate mode of comparison.
Without going too far afield, let us note two points: first,
European culture was the proud inheritor of the Renaissance
tradition, and, going back still further, of classical culture;
second, the European countries are compact. Their land masses are
such that the notion of "frontier" simply would not have arisen in
the same way as it did in America. On the other side of the globe,
however, there does exist a country capable of serving as a
suitable mirror. We speak, of course, of Russia. That country also
came relatively late onto the cultural horizon, and was not privy
to the Renaissance tradition. Furthermore, her land mass is such as
to be "experi mentally infmite" in character - not unlike the
American frontier. It is hoped that much can be leamed about the
present cultural context by com paring the two countries in their
youthful stages."
This book offers a complete survey of contemporary Soviet theory of
knowledge. It is by no means meant to replace De Vries' excellent
treatise on the same subject. Since De Vries depended mainly on the
'classics of Marxism' and the few contemporary Soviet works which
were available in German translation, his account is at best an in
troduction to the contemporary period. In a sense this book is com
plementary to his: he presents the doctrines of the classics and
criticizes them, this book recounts what came after and what is
going on now. Epistemology and theory of knowledge are taken here
as equivalent terms, representing the Soviet gnose%gija and teorija
poznanija. No attempt to justify the existence of such a
philosophical discipline will be attempted here. Even outside of
this question of the legitimacy of epistemo logy, it is not easy to
delimit the domain of its purvey. We have, therefore, taken it in a
wider rather than narrow sense. This means that some ques tions of
logic and psychology have been taken up - to the extent that they
overlap with the field of philosophical consideration of
knowledge."
The occasion for this work was provided by the recent
Marxist-Leninist philosophic pUblications on problems involving the
term 'information' and by the extensive discussions of ideas
originating in cybernetics. Thus, the issues are quite recent,
which explains some peculiarities of our ap- proach. Our main
effort has been toward the clarification and systematiza- tion of
questions on information, which arise in the context of
cybernetics. Where basic questions are involved, one is brought
back to traditional issues as is often the case when dealing with a
novel subject. Stress on questions drawn from physics is due to the
author's professional involve- ment in this field. This work was
written under the direction of Professor J. M. Bochenski,
principally in the context of a special program at the Institute of
East- European Studies of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland);
a program carried out by Professor Bochenski with the collaboration
of Dr. S. Muller-Markus. Participation in the special program was
made possible by a grant from the West German 'Innenministerium'.
Completion of the work was subsidized by the Bundesinstitut fUr
ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien in Cologne. Our
thanks go to these persons and organisations, who are in no way
responsible for the content of the work. Givisiez, May 1967
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE Although we have made use of the works of Cherry
and MacKay, cited in the bibliography, our translation of many
terms may still seem some- what arbitrary to some readers. The
explanation for this is threefold.
Early in 1958 a number of research projects on Soviet philosophy
were started at the Institute of East-European Studies at the
University of Fribourg (Switzerland) under the direction of the
undersigned. At present, they are all completed or nearly so and
their results are described in 18 different volumes. In spite of
the fact that all of them have been already published or soon will
be (mostly in German), it has been thought worthwhile to present
their main conclusions in the form of short English reports. This
book contains in the main these reports. Only the two programmatic
papers (my own and that of Dr. Buchholz) and the study of Dr. Dahm
are not direct results of the above-mentioned projects. But it will
be clear to everyone that they, too, are closely connected with the
subject envisaged and are written from a similar point of view. It
will, perhaps, be convenient to briefly formulate this standpoint.
All the writings included here are concerned with recent (i. e.
mainly post Stalinist) developments in Soviet philosophy, where
"Soviet" is taken in the wide meaning of the word, covering also
Marxism-Leninism in Communist countries other than the Soviet
Union. All the authors started with the assumption that there are
interesting aspects to these more recent developments. There was
also a common assumption that only specialized work on first-hand
sources can be of relevance in this field."
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. The reasons for this
conceptual proliferation are numerous. But certainly one factor is
the increasing development of contemporary means of publication and
communication, which in turn make possible the rapid dissemination
of ideas as well as an informed reaction to them. And this in turn
has increased the possibility for serious philosophic exchange by
enhancing the available opportunities for the interaction of
competing forms of thought. But, although informed philosophic
interaction has in principle become increasingly possible in recent
years, the frequency, scope and quality of such discussion has
often been less than satisfactory. Contemporary philosophic
viewpoints tend not to interact in a Hegelian manner, as
complementary aspects of a totally satisfactory and a-perspectival
view, facets of a singly and all-embracing true position. Rather,
contemporary philosophic viewpoints tend to portray themselves as
mutually exclusive alternatives only occasionally willing to
acknowledge the possible validity or even the intrinsic interest of
other perspectives. Thus, although the multiplication of different
forms of philosophy in principle means that there are greater
possibilities for meaning ful exchange between them, in practice
the tendency of each of the various philosophic positions to raise
claims to philosophic truth from its point of view alone has had
the effect of impeding such interaction."
The Soviet philosophical scene has experienced remarkable growth
since the innovations of the 50's and the renovations of the 60's.
This volume of Sovietica is intended by the editors as a finger on
the pulse of the Marxist-Leninist corpus philosophicum as we enter
the 1970's. Published in the years between 1960 and 1970, the
Filosofskaja en ciklopedija (FE) has replaced the Kratkij
filosofskij slovar' (Short Philo sophic Dictionary: 1939, 1941,
1951 and 1954) and the Filosofskij slovar' (Philosophic Dictionary:
1963). It is an impressive work - 2994 pages in five volumes (I,
1960, 504 pp.; II, 1962, 575 pp.; III, 1964, 584 pp.; IV, 1967, 591
pp.; V, 1970, 740 pp.), with the editors and authors representing
all the contemporary Soviet philosophers of note. The FE has been
extensively reviewed in Kommunist (1972, 5, 119-127) and in Studies
in Soviet Thought beginning with SST 12 (1972) 4]. Restrictions of
space have forced us to omit much that was originally to be
included. The same limitations have obliged us to deviate from the
initial methodological rule which was 'to include only complete, un
abridged articles' - in order to avoid distortion by selection.
Only two articles have been shortened: only the basic portion of
'science' has been included; we have dropped 'natural science',
'sciences on man and society', and 'classification of sciences' (a
total of thirteen pages in Russian) - this last with regret and
with apologies to Professor Kedrov."
In this year of bicentennial celebration, there will no doubt take
place several cultural analyses of the American tradition. This is
only as it should be, for without an extensive, broad-based inquiry
into where we have come from, we shall surely not foresee where we
might go. Nonetheless, most cultural analyses of the American
context suffer from a common fault - the lack of a different
context to use for purposes of comparison. True, American values
and ideals were partly inherited from the European tradition. But
that tradition is in many ways an inadequate mode of comparison.
Without going too far afield, let us note two points: first,
European culture was the proud inheritor of the Renaissance
tradition, and, going back still further, of classical culture;
second, the European countries are compact. Their land masses are
such that the notion of "frontier" simply would not have arisen in
the same way as it did in America. On the other side of the globe,
however, there does exist a country capable of serving as a
suitable mirror. We speak, of course, of Russia. That country also
came relatively late onto the cultural horizon, and was not privy
to the Renaissance tradition. Furthermore, her land mass is such as
to be "experi mentally infmite" in character - not unlike the
American frontier. It is hoped that much can be leamed about the
present cultural context by com paring the two countries in their
youthful stages."
On February 24-25, 1956, in a closed session of the 20th Congress
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita S. Khrushchev
made his now famous speech on the crimes of the Stalin era. That
speech marked a break with the past and it marked the end of what
J.M. Bochenski dubbed the "dead period" of Soviet philosophy.
Soviet philosophy changed abruptly after 1956, especially in the
area of dialectical materialism. Yet most philosophers in the West
neither noticed nor cared. For them, the resurrection of Soviet
philosophy, even if believable, was of little interest. The reasons
for the lack of belief and interest were multiple. Soviet
philosophy had been dull for so long that subtle differences made
little difference. The Cold War was in a frigid period and
reinforced the attitude of avoiding anything Soviet. Phenomenology
and exis tentialism were booming in Europe and analytic philosophy
was king on the Anglo-American philosophical scene. Moreover, not
many philosophers in the West knew or could read Russian or were
motivated to learn it to be able to read Soviet philosophical
works. The launching of Sputnik awakened the West from its self
complacent slumbers. Academic interest in the Soviet Union grew."
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 term "method" is taken in the sense usual
in Western books on methodology .1 In view of the content of the
first chapter it will be useful to explain the last term a little
more fully. By method we mean a procedure and it is obvious that
the principles according to which a procedure is carried out are
rules, i.e. imperatives, which tell us not what is but what should
be done. Such imperatives mayor may not be connected with and
founded on certain descriptive statements (the fact that every rule
of formal logic is based on a corresponding law has been well-known
since Husserl's "Logische Unter suchungen" and is generally
accepted in contemporary logic), but such a foundation is
irrelevant to a methodological study. The object of such a study is
to find out what these rules are, why they are accepted and how
they are inter-connected and applied. This is how methodology - the
science of method - is conceived in Western treatises on the
subject and this is also the standpoint assumed here."
This book offers a complete survey of contemporary Soviet theory of
knowledge. It is by no means meant to replace De Vries' excellent
treatise on the same subject. Since De Vries depended mainly on the
'classics of Marxism' and the few contemporary Soviet works which
were available in German translation, his account is at best an in
troduction to the contemporary period. In a sense this book is com
plementary to his: he presents the doctrines of the classics and
criticizes them, this book recounts what came after and what is
going on now. Epistemology and theory of knowledge are taken here
as equivalent terms, representing the Soviet gnose%gija and teorija
poznanija. No attempt to justify the existence of such a
philosophical discipline will be attempted here. Even outside of
this question of the legitimacy of epistemo logy, it is not easy to
delimit the domain of its purvey. We have, therefore, taken it in a
wider rather than narrow sense. This means that some ques tions of
logic and psychology have been taken up - to the extent that they
overlap with the field of philosophical consideration of
knowledge."
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science are devoted to
symposia, con gresses, colloquia, monographs and collected papers
on the philosophical foundations of the sciences. It is now our
pleasure to include A. A. Zi nov'ev's treatise on complex logic
among these volumes. Zinov'ev is one of the most creative of modern
Soviet logicians, and at the same time an innovative worker on the
methodological foundations of science. More over, Zinov'ev,
although still a developing scholar, has exerted a sub stantial and
stimulating influence upon his colleagues and students in Moscow
and within other philosophical and logical circles of the Soviet
Union. Hence it may be helpful, in bringing this present work to an
English-reading audience, to review briefly some contemporary
Soviet investigations into scientific methodology. During the
1950's, a vigorous new research program in logic was under taken,
and the initial published work -characteristic of most Soviet pub
lications in the logic and methodology of the sciences - was a
collection of essays, Logical Investigations (Moscow, 1959). Among
the authors, in addition to Zinov'ev himself, were the philosophers
A. Kol'man and P. V. Tavanec, and the mathematicians and linguists,
S. A. Janovskaja, A. S. Esenin-Vol'pin, S. K. Saumjan, G. N.
Povarov."
Dieser siebente Band der Bibliographie erfasst die sowje- tische
philosophische Literatur der Jahre 1964-1966 und enthalt: 1. Die
Titel philosophischer Artikel aus den folgenden zeit- schriften:
Voprosy filosofii, Filosofskie nauki, Kommunist, Uspechi Fizi
eskich NaUk, Vestnik AN SSSR, vestnik MGU, Vestnik LGU, Voprosy
psicholOgii. Ebenso sind einige Artikel aus weniger be- kannten
Zeitschriften erfasst. 2. Die Titel philosophischer Bucher, die in
dieser Zeit veroeffentlicht wurden, mit eigenen Angaben der in
Sammelwerken (sborniki) erschienenen Artikel. Die Literatur der
Jahre 1967 ff.wird kunftig in den Studies in Soviet Thought laufend
berichtet werden, zusammen mit den jeweiligen Verzeichnissen. Das
Material fur den vorliegenden Band wurde von den Mitglie- dern des
Instituts gesammelt. Besonderer Dank gilt P.J. Beemans, W.F.
Boeselager, G.A. Collins (Boston College), D.D. Comey (Cornell),
Anne Heidenreich, T.R. Payne und J.J. O'Rourke. Die endgultige
Zusammenstellung des Materials besorgte Prof. T.J. Blakeley, Boston
College. FOREWORD This seventh volume of the Bibliographie covers
Soviet philosophie production during the period 1964-1966 and
contains: 1. Titles of philosophie articles fram the following
journals: Voprosy filosofii, Filosofskie nauki, Kommunist, Uspechi
fizi es- kich nauk, Vestnik AN SSSR. vestnik MGU. Vestnik LGU,
Voprosy psichologii. There are also occasional articles from
lesser-known journals. 2. Titles of philosophie books published
during the period, witn separate citation of the articles contained
in the collective works (sborniki). Titles for 1967 ff. will appear
on a current basis in Studie in Soviet Thought, supplemented by
periodic indices.
Seit dern Eingreifen A. A. Zdanovs am 24 Juni 1947 hat die sowje
tische Philosophie einen bemerkenswerten Aufschwung erlebt. Nach
einer mit Recht als "still" bezeichneten Periode, die mit der Ver
urteilung A. M. Deborins am 31 Januar 1931 begann und erst durch
den genannten Eingriff ein Ende fand, kam es zu einem gleichzeitig
quantitativen und qualitativen Wachstum: einmal erscheinen seit
dieser Zeit viel mehr philosophische Schriften, und zweitens ist
die sowjetische Philosophie von Neuem zum Kampfplatz verschiedener
Tendenzen geworden, wobei die bisherige massive Zitatologie immer
mehr durch echt philosophische Untersuchungen abgelost wird. Ei
nige dieser Arbeiten sind auch fUr Philosophen der freien Welt
nicht ohne Interesse - besonders fUr diejenigen unter ihnen, die,
wie der Herausgeber dieser Reihe, mit den sowjetischen Philosophen
den . Objektivismus, den erkenntnistheoretischen Realismus, die An
erkannung der Ontologie und der formalen Logik sowie schliesslich
einen ganzheitlichen Begriff vom Menschen teilen. Aber auch an
dersdenkende Philosophen werden an der sowjetischen Philosophie mit
ihrer fortschreitenden Entwicklung ein wachsendes Interesse haben
kennen. Es scheint unter diesen Umstanden geboten, die
zeitgenessische Philosophie der Sowjet-Union besser kennen zu
lernen. Es bieten sich hier zweierlei Aufgaben: einmal mUssen
spezialisierte Stu diengruppen eingehende und differenzierte
Untersuchungen Uber ein zelne Denkrichtungen, vielleicht sogar Uber
einzelne Denker, in Angriff nehmen; zweitens scheint es
wUnschenswert, auch denjeni gen Philosophen, die des Russischen
nicht machtig sind, zumindest einen Zugang zu den sowjetischen
Quellen zu eroffnen."
Die ersten drei Hefte dieser Reihe enthalten die Titel der
Aufsatze, die in den sowjetischen philosophischen Fachzeitschriften
(VFund FN) zwischen 1947 und 1960 erschienen sind, sowie die Titel
von Blichern die in diesen Zeitschriften angeflihrt oder in der
Bibliothek des Freiburger Osteuropa Instituts vorhanden waren.
Ursprlinglich flir den Gebrauch der Mitglieder des Instituts
vorgesehen, wurden sie in der Hoffnung veroffentlicht andern
Forschern auf diesem Gebiet nlitzlich zu sein, vor aHem da die
sowjetischen Beitrage zur eigenen philoso phischen Bibliographie
sehr fragmentarisch und schwer erhaltlich sind. Diese Hoffnung
scheint berechtigt, da die ersten zwei Hefte bereits neu aufgelegt
werden mussten. Es wurde daher beschlossen, die Basis der
Bibliographie flir die genannte Periode zu erweitern, und zwar
durch die Berlicksichtigung von Aufsatzen in anderen Zeitschriften,
von Dissertationen und von Blichern, die durch die oben genannten
QueHen nicht erfaBbar waren. Das vorliegende vierte Heft enthlilt
die Ergebnisse dieser Erweiterung. Die gesamte Reihe enthlilt 7940
Titel, womit schlitzungsweise 85 Prozent der sowjetischen
philosophischen Literatur zwischen 1947 und 1960 und - was noch
wichtiger scheint - der flir die Entwicklung dieser Philo sophie
entscheidende Teil derselben erfaBt ist. Ein flinftes Heft wird
vollstandige Namen- und Sachregister enthalten."
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