Dialectical Materialism and the History of Philosophy

A book about how to write the history of philosophy - which sounds narrow and was not.

The history of philosophy was one of the few places in Soviet intellectual life where genuine scholarship remained possible, for a reason both simple and slightly shameful: the material was dead and foreign. Kant had no faction. Fichte could be neither rehabilitated nor unrehabilitated. A philosopher who wanted to think in public about method, evidence, development, and the relation of a doctrine to its age could do it on German idealism and could not do it on anything nearer home. This volume is the record of a serious mind working inside that permission.

Oizerman's questions are real ones. What makes a history of philosophy more than a catalogue of opinions? In what sense do philosophical problems persist across centuries, and in what sense are they replaced? How should a historian handle a doctrine he judges false - as error to be dismissed, or as a necessary stage? What is the relation between the internal logic of a philosophical development and the social world that produced it?

Best read alongside his other volumes on the formation of Marxist philosophy and on the main trends, which he names in his opening pages as the works this one supplements.

A note on dating: the text is older than the imprint. Its single political citation is to the Twenty-Fifth Congress of 1976, and it does not know the Twenty-Sixth met in February 1981 - which a book going to press in 1982 would certainly have quoted. The most recent item in the bibliography is from 1977.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.