B.M. Hessen. The Materialist Dialectic in the Struggle with the Ideological Rit

Abstract

Archival publication of a number of previously unknown texts of the outstanding Soviet philosopher and historian of science, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Boris Mikhailovich Hessen follows this introduction. B. M. Hessen belonged to the philosophical school of academician A. M. Deborin. Deborin school actively developed philosophical and methodological problems of advanced areas of natural science: quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity and genetics. The Deborin school provided ideological protection of these Sciences in the conditions of Stalinism. In this struggle many representatives of this philosophical school were destroyed. Deborin, Hessen and their colleagues developed the most important philosophical and methodological problems that arose in connection with the development of modern natural science. These include, first, the problem of quality irreducibility of higher forms of motion of matter to the lower ones. This problem is discussed in abstracts of the Hessen at the First all-Union Congress of physicists in Odessa in 1930. Secondly, the problem of objective chance. She dedicated the Hessen report on the scientific session of the Institute of philosophy, dedicated to the anniversary of Lenin’s book “Materialism and empiriocriticism”.