EBOOK
About
Almost everything on this list was written by a committee. This one begins in the first person and keeps it.
Anatoly Rakitov opens by announcing that he will set out the principles of the philosophy himself, and he sustains that voice throughout: staging Socratic dialogues, telling the reader where he will return to a question, and granting that a serious materialist cannot simply dismiss idealist arguments out of hand. This is one man teaching.
The man is worth knowing. Rakitov, born in 1928, was a serious philosopher of science and logic rather than a doctrinal functionary, and within a few years of finishing this book he had broken with Marxism-Leninism altogether and gone into the service of Boris Yeltsin as head of the analytical and information centre of the Russian presidency.
So this is very probably the last systematic primer of Soviet philosophy, written by a man who may already have been half out the door - and reading it with that in view, from its own tone rather than from anything projected onto its author, is the most interesting thing that can be done with it.
For once the date on the spine is the date of the text, and the book announces the fact in its own vocabulary: the introduction speaks of the restructuring under way in the USSR and of overcoming the stagnant tendencies of the two preceding decades. A glasnost book to its bones.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
Anatoly Rakitov opens by announcing that he will set out the principles of the philosophy himself, and he sustains that voice throughout: staging Socratic dialogues, telling the reader where he will return to a question, and granting that a serious materialist cannot simply dismiss idealist arguments out of hand. This is one man teaching.
The man is worth knowing. Rakitov, born in 1928, was a serious philosopher of science and logic rather than a doctrinal functionary, and within a few years of finishing this book he had broken with Marxism-Leninism altogether and gone into the service of Boris Yeltsin as head of the analytical and information centre of the Russian presidency.
So this is very probably the last systematic primer of Soviet philosophy, written by a man who may already have been half out the door - and reading it with that in view, from its own tone rather than from anything projected onto its author, is the most interesting thing that can be done with it.
For once the date on the spine is the date of the text, and the book announces the fact in its own vocabulary: the introduction speaks of the restructuring under way in the USSR and of overcoming the stagnant tendencies of the two preceding decades. A glasnost book to its bones.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.