Analytical Philosophy on the Russian Stage. Adaptation and Development (1913–1959)

Anatoly S. Kolesnikov

doi:10.21638/spbu17.2024.402

Authors

Anatoly S. Kolesnikov St. Petersburg State University, 7–9, Universitetskaya nab., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation https://orcid.org/0009-0007-7260-8807

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu17.2024.402

Abstract

The article reveals the characteristics of adaptation and development of analytical philosophy on the Russian stage in the period of 1913–1959. Scientists and philosophers were familiar with the first and second Positivism, and familiarity with analytical philosophy was mediated by the latest work in logic and mathematics, the reduction of mathematics to logic, and logic to philosophy. Publications of Russell’s work ‘Problems of Philosophy’ and ‘Treatise’ by Wittgenstein were of special importance, as well as considerations on the sensory data as the basis of new realism, the role of language, sign, semantics, and artificial languages in their role of studying the world. It is shown that it was in line with analytical philosophy that Russian thinkers developed making accent at the very topical problems of logic and mathematics, philosophy of science and theory of knowledge; the problem of universals, the relevance of which is associated with the idea of correspondence between the structure of language and the structure of the world; development of a semantic theory of discursive knowledge, a theory of meaning were important because the study of linguistic signs was declared to be the only means of objective knowledge of thinking. Domestic philosophers have learned that the rational meaning of realism in the philosophy of mathematics is the statement that the fundamental structures of mathematics are directly related to categorical ideas about reality, they seem to merge with ontology, absorb some aspects of categorical ideas, providing the corresponding concepts with the status of universality and intuitive clarity and a certain independence from the formal language of mathematics. Thus, in logic, the problems of language, the problem of interpreting sign dependencies come to the foreground. In the philosophical literature of the 1950s, the image of representatives of analytical philosophy as subjective idealists gradually emerged, while the roots of subjectivism lie in fundamental epistemological principles, and not in specific ways of their implementation.

Keywords:

empiricism, realism, logical positivism, analytical philosophy, Russell, Wittgenstein, philosophy of language, problem of universals

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References

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