Losskii, Nikolai

Born Nov. 24 (Dec. 6), 1870, in Kreslovka (near Vitebsk); died Jan. 24, 1965, in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois. Russian idealist philosopher; an intuitionist and personalist. Assistant professor (1900) and professor (1916) at St. Petersburg University.

In 1922, Losskii was exiled abroad. He lived in Czechoslovakia until 1945. He was a professor of philosophy at the Russian Orthodox seminary in New York from 1947 to 1950. According to Losskii, the main task of philosophy is to construct a theory of the world as an integral whole based primarily on religious experience. The central element of the world is the mystically understood individual as a supratemporal agent of creativity. Cognition begins when a series of intentional (purposive) acts (recognition, attention) is directed toward an object. Depending on the nature of the object, the object is known through various forms of intuition—intellectual, sensory, or mystical. According to Losskii, the fundamental traits of Russian philosophy are its ethical nature, religious reality, and synthetic structure. Losskii minimized the role of materialist thinkers in the development of Russian philosophy (History of Russian Philosophy, 1951; Russian edition, 1954).