Kirjahaku

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.

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 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.