BOGDANOV. - This is the pseudonym of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovsky, Russian revolutionary, physician and philosopher, b. 1873. A member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, around 1909, together with Lunacharsky and Gorky, he organized a Bolshevik propaganda school in Capri. Later he broke away from the party. After the revolution he founded and directed the Institute for Blood Transfusion.

Under the influence of Mach, B. sought to give Marxism an empiriocritical foundation, transforming empiriocriticism into an empiriomonism. This gave Lenin the occasion to write his famous work Materialism and Empiriocriticism, in which he set out to defend dialectical materialism as the genuine Marxist philosophy against the attempt to introduce other philosophical conceptions into it. B. sought to overcome the dualism between the physical and the psychic, which is found in Mach, by considering them as elements of a single experience. The difference would lie only in this, that psychic phenomena represent individually organized experience, and physical phenomena on the contrary socially organized experience.

Works: Empiriomonizm (Empiriomonism), Moscow-St. Petersburg 1906-1908; Tectologia (Tectology), Berlin 1922.

Bibliography3 works

BIBL.: J. Hecker, Russian Sociology, London 1934, pp. 279-296; G. Plechanov, Materialismus militum, Moscow-Leningrad 1931, passim; G. Wetter, Il materialismo dialettico sovietico, Turin 1948, pp. 101-109.

Gustavo A. Wetter

@incollection{ec2_bogdanov, author = {Wetter, Gustavo Andrea}, title = {Bogdanov}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {II}, pages = {1758--1759}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1949}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/bogdanov} }

One of some 20,000 entries brought back from the twelve printed volumes (1948–54). Spotted something? Help us improve it.

About this entry