Eleven Soviet philosophers were asked to describe what their discipline was doing, and this is the answer they gave. That makes it different from the other philosophy titles on this list: not a monograph, not a textbook, but the profession's self-portrait, commissioned for export.
The contributors are the discipline's senior people, and each chapter has a named author who can be held to it: P. N. Fedoseyev, Academician; T. I. Oizerman, corresponding member; and nine Doctors of Philosophical Sciences including E. V. Ilyenkov, V. A. Lektorsky, A. N. Leontyev, D. P. Gorsky, A. S. Bogomolov and V. Z. Kelle. Ilyenkov and Lektorsky in particular were philosophers of real standing whose work has outlasted the state that housed them.
The foreword states the purpose plainly: to show that no gap exists between dialectical materialism and the problems of contemporary philosophy, and to meet what the authors take to be a growing Western scientific interest in materialist dialectics. So the addressee is a Western philosopher of science, and the charge being rebutted is that Soviet philosophy had fallen out of the conversation.
Its organising theme is Lenin's call for an alliance between Marxist philosophers and natural scientists, and the argument is that the alliance worked. The chapters on cognition, on the ideal, on logic and on the philosophy of the natural sciences are serious work.
For once there is no lag; the most recent citation is the Twenty-Fifth Congress of February 1976.
Translated by Robert Daglish. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
