Galich, Aleksandr

(also A. I. Govorov, A. I. Nikiforov). Born 1783 in the town of Trubchevsk, in present-day Briansk Oblast; died Sept. 9, 1848, at Tsarskoe Selo, now the town of Pushkin. Russian psychologist and idealist philosopher.

Galich studied in Germany and taught Russian and Latin at Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum and philosophy at the Pedagogical Institute (beginning in 1819, the University of St. Petersburg). He demonstrated that thought is subject to the laws of the objective world and that “created matter” is indestructible. He understood truth to be the correspondence of knowledge to objects, and from this standpoint he criticized subjective idealism. Although he recognized the methodology of the experimental sciences, Galich was opposed to materialism. His Lexicon of Philosophical Subjects (vol. 1, 1845) was one of the first reference books on philosophy in Russia. In aesthetics Galich held to romanticism (An Essay at a Science of the Beautiful), criticized the classical theory of imitation, and considered romanticism the art of the future. In psychology (A Picture of Man … , 1834), Galich tried to combine an idealistic and a natural science treatment of the life of the spirit.