This article considers the history of Soviet Spinoza studies after World War II. V.V. Sokolov, editor of the last Soviet publication of Spinoza’s works, regards him as a metaphysician, at times rising to dialectics, and a pantheist rising to materialism. E.V. Ilyenkov, Ya. A. Milner and B.G. Kuznetsov offer a radically different interpretation of Spinoza, as our advanced contemporary. The article provides a critical analysis of the concept of man as a “thinking body,” which Ilyenkov mistakenly ascribes to Spinoza and (...) then corrects on behalf of Marx. Kuznetsov, in his own words, performs a “neo-Spinozist analysis of science.” He is looking for equivalents of Spinoza’s concepts in modern physics, starting with the “physically meaningful” concept of being. Milner wrote a new Ethics, based on the concept of “free necessity” as a social duty consciously performed by the individual. (shrink)

The latest book by Russian philosopher Sergey Mareev consists of two parts: recollections of his teacher Evald Ilyenkov, and reflections on some of the key themes of Ilyenkov’s philosophical heritage. The author traces several polemical lines related to the problem of the ideal, dialectics of the abstract and the concrete, the principle of historicism, as well as Ilyenkov’s interpretation of Spinoza and Hegel.