Version: v1, Published online: 2002
Retrieved April 25, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/moscow-psychological-society/v-1
Article Summary
The Moscow Psychological Society, a learned society founded in 1885 at Moscow University, was the first and main centre of the remarkable philosophical achievements of the Russian Silver Age, as the cultural renaissance at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries has come to be known. By the end of its activity in 1922, the Psychological Society had attracted most of the country’s outstanding philosophers and had made the major contribution to the growth of Russian philosophy. In pursuit of its goal of the free, autonomous development of philosophy in Russia, the Society advanced a powerful neo-idealist critique of positivism, an outlook that was remarkably pervasive in Russia from the middle of the nineteenth century and that sought to eliminate speculative philosophy as ‘unscientific’. For leading philosophers in the Society, neo-idealism offered compelling theoretical support not only for the autonomy of philosophy against reductive positivism, but also for rule-of-law liberalism and constitutional reform. This philosophical defence of liberalism helps differentiate the Society from other currents in the Silver Age. The Society closed in 1922 with the forced exile of many of its members. Its intellectual legacy has attracted much attention in post-communist Russia.
Poole, Randall A.. Moscow Psychological Society, 2002, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-E077-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/moscow-psychological-society/v-1.
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