Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union

About a year and half ago, I picked up in a used-book store a copy of Professor Loren R. Graham's book, *Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union*. This 1987 book is a revision of his earlier 1972 book, *Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union*. To the earlier book, Graham added on some new chapters, revised earlier chapters, while deleting some old material. This work, like the earlier one, owes much to research that he was able to do within the Soviet Union. Loren Graham's book on science and philosophy in the former Soviet Union is noteworthy for the scope of its coverage of work done in the natural sciences and the philosophy of science there. Professor Graham provides an almost encyclopedic coverage of many different scientific disciplines including physics (with discussions on relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology), biology (encompassing genetics, physiology, evolutionary biology), psychology, computer science and cybernetics. He relates Soviet debates in those different disciplines to arguments over dialectical materialism. He points out while a lot of Soviet writing on Marxism and dialectical materialism was pure hackery, a lot of highly talented scientists, philosophers, and other scholars in the Soviet Union took dialectical materialism quite seriously and they wrote some significant works on the philosophy of science from a dialectical materialist perspective. While in Stalin's time, it was almost mandatory for scientists to include in their writings genuflections to Marx, Lenin, and Comrade Stalin to ensure state support for their work, this was generally not true after Stalin's time and it was quite possible for scientists to go about their work without bothering themselves over Marxism or dialectical materialism, just as most Western scientists don't like to bother themselves over philosophical or political issues. Nevertheless, Graham points out many eminent scientists and scholars continued to write on dialectical materialism and attempt to show that system of thought could help to illuminate issues in their own disciplines. In other words they continued to take dialectical materialism seriously as a philosophy even when it was not mandatory for them to bother with it as a means for winning support for their work. Graham in discussing the Soviet dialectical materialists of the 1970s and 1980s, distinguishes between two schools or tendencies: the "ontologists" and the "epistemologists." The latter was a tendency that emerged in the post-Stalin era which attempted to draw clear distinctions between scientific issues and philosophical issues. In effect, they were attempting to elaborate Marxist and dialectical materialist defenses of the autonomy of scientific disciplines in order to curb the sort of state interference and censorship that was characteristic of the Stalin era. These philosophers and scientists argued that the proper concern of the philosophy of science was with issues of epistem