The Problem of the Ideal

A book of philosophy, and the argument inside it is a real one.

That sentence should not need writing, but most of the titles on this list were commissioned works where a line governed the answer. This is a technical monograph on the mind-brain problem and on the philosophical category of the ideal, written by a man who had spent twenty years on the subject - and it is one half of one of the few genuine controversies Soviet philosophy conducted in the open.

The other party was Evald Ilyenkov, the most original philosopher his generation in the USSR produced, who had been pushed out of his positions and who killed himself in 1979. Ilyenkov held that the ideal is not in the head at all but exists objectively, in the forms of human activity and culture; Dubrovsky argued that it is a property of subjective reality with a determinate neurophysiological basis, and that the question is answerable by science rather than by definition. The two positions, and the quality of the exchange between them, are the reason to read the book.

What Dubrovsky does with Ilyenkov is its whole interest, and it is not what a reader of this list will expect.

The manuscript closed around 1982 or 1983 despite the later imprint: the Soviet references thicken through the late 1970s, thin after 1982, and stop.

Translated by Vladimir Stankevich.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.