Recent Soviet evaluations of American philosophy
pp. 215-220
in: James J. O'Rourke, Thomas J. Blakeley, Friedrich Rapp (eds), Contemporary Marxism, Berlin, Springer, 1984Abstract
It would, I suppose, not be good form to begin by saying there are no recent Soviet evaluations of American philosophy or, at least, none worth mentioning. The fact of the matter is, however, that Soviet mentions of American philosophy have been extremely rare over the past ten years. For example, of some 2700 items in Voprosy filosofit and Filosofskie nauki since 1968, only 60, or a little over 2%, have to do with American philosophy. And, none of these deal with classical American philosophy in the sense of Peirce, James and Dewey. Only three names occur more than once — Quine twice, Kuhn three times, and Marcuse twice — if the last can even be considered as belonging to "American philosophy". It is clear that in Soviet philosophic journals, at least, more attention is paid to "philosophy in America" than to "American philosophy" in the classical sense. This is in stark contrast with German interest in Peirce and the international interest in James and phenomenology.
