Abstract

Twenty-five years have passed since the fifth and final volume of the Philosophical Encyclopedia [Filosofskaia entsiklopediia] was published in 1970. This serves as an occasion for us to examine this publication, which in its own way was unique. Neither before nor since its appearance has philosophical scholarship received such thorough and profound expression in our country, and never had it undergone such a thorough updating. The interval over which it was published, from 1960 to 1970, coincides with mathematical exactitude with an epoch in the history of our culture that we are accustomed to call the epoch of the "people of the sixties." A study of the "people of the sixties" is of major and in many respects special interest, since this period differs radically in its productivity from preceding years in the history of Soviet philosophy. When we commence serious research on this history, the study of the collective reason of our country's philosophers that found its expression in the Philosophical Encyclopedia will occupy an honored place