Alexander Bogdanov at the Institute of the Scientific Philosophy: from the Decline of the Philosophy to the Scientific Monism

Abstract

The author considers the activity of Alexander A. Bogdanov as a full member of the Institute of Scientific Philosophy, established in 1921. Special attention is paid to the line of radical denial of the actual meaning of philosophy, what was characteristic for Bogdanov’s works of those years. This topic was manifested in the article “From Religious Monism to Scientific One”, which was read at the Institute in February 1923 as Bogdanov’s scientific report. Presenting the devel­opment of human knowledge as a change of historical forms of monism based on the evolution of labor practice and the inherent desire to coordinate cognitive ac­tivity, Bogdanov proclaimed the advent of the era of scientific monism and pre­sented his own “universal organization science” as a means of the future real unity of collective experience. The political campaign against Bogdanov con­ducted throughout the 1920s also affected his activities at the Institute of Scien­tific Philosophy: the thinker was removed from the staff, and the possibilities of his philosophical work had been narrowing more and more every year. However, despite the pressure Bogdanov continued to work at the Institute, taking part, in particular, in the heated discussions around Spinoza and Bergson’s philoso­phies, which marked the beginning of a new round of polemics among “mecha­nists” and “dialectics”. The most important research interests of Bogdanov in the last years of his life were also philosophical problems of biology, the foundations of natural science knowledge, the methodological basis of the theory of relativ­ity. Thus, the scientific activity of A.A. Bogdanov as a full member of the Insti­tute reflected almost all the philosophical topics and problems that were signifi­cant for him at that time