Скачать или смотреть David Bakhurst: Ilyenkov, Education and Philosophy

From the outset of his career, Ilyenkov saw himself as an educator, seeking to reform and renew Soviet philosophers’ conception of philosophical inquiry and its role in the building of communism. But at first, he did not theorize education. He maintained, contrary to Soviet orthodoxy, that philosophy is the science of thought, but in his early writings he embraces a conception of logic that treats thought impersonally, focusing on the forms and movement of thought and the logic of scientific inquiry. In this, thought is understood as a socio-historical reality, but the focus is not on the individual thinker. This begins to change with Ilyenkov’s famous writing on the ideal, which opens up space for a conception of individual formation, a conception that plays an important role in the creative, humanistic Marxism so often associated with Ilyenkov’s legacy. My paper explores the reasons behind this change of emphasis and examines its expression in Ilyenkov’s often-neglected contributions on education, from his participation in the ill-fated Komsomol’skaya Pravda roundtable in 1967 to his passionate defense of education as “learning to think”. I aim to show how both the theory and the practice of education were central to Ilyenkov’s life and work.

David Bakhurst is George Whalley Distinguished University Professor at Queen’s University, Canada. He is the author of Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (Cambridge, 1991), The Formation of Reason (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and numerous articles in books and journals. His next book, a collection of his essays on Russian thought, will be published by Brill in 2023 under the title, The Heart of the Matter: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and the Courage of Thought. Bakhurst is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Executive Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education.