Philosophy, Institute of

(Academy of Sciences of the USSR), the USSR’s main center for scientific research in philosophy. The institute was organized in Moscow in 1929, in connection with the reorganization of the philosophy section of the Communist Academy, and since 1936 it has been a part of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

The institute’s work ranges over the following areas of study: materialist dialectics, both as theory and as general methodology; Lenin’s theory of reflection; the theory of knowledge; current philosophical issues and prospects for development in the natural sciences; the role of integrative trends—systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, and analysis of the interaction between the sciences; the theory of dialectics as applied to social development, worldwide revolutionary process, and social progress; the theory of socioeconomic formations; the philosophical and sociological analysis of a mature socialist society and of its progress toward communism; the dialectics of the relationship between the national and the international; the principles and fundamental laws governing the formation and education of a new type of personality and the socialist way of life; the categories of aesthetics, the theory of socialist realism, and the question of aesthetics as part of the education of the working people; the theoretical principles of historical philosophical development; the history of pre-Marxist and Marxist-Leninist philosophy; critiques of contemporary bourgeois philosophy, revisionism, and reformism; and the exposure of anticommunism and anti-Sovietism.

The Institute of Philosophy is charged with the nationwide coordination of research studies in philosophy; it offers graduate programs in philosophy and publishes the journal Voprosyfilosofii (Problems of Philosophy).