Abstract

Semyon L. Frank was a leading representative of the metaphysical current in early 20th-century Russian philosophy. This study traces the evolution of his world-view from the 1890s, when he was a student Marxist, to 1915, when he published The Object of Knowledge, his first book-length exposition of his mature philosophical system. Challenging the established interpretation of Frank's philosophical development, which makes much of his supposed indebtedness to Vladimir Solovyov, the study emphasizes the important role played in his intellectual formation by currents in the philosophical thought of contemporary Europe, including Nietzscheanism, neo-Kantianism, and Lebensphilosophie. At the same time, it explores the linkage between changes in Frank's philosophical positions and changes in his views on the vocation of the intellectual in Russia. ;Frank's struggle to define himself in relation to the Kantian tradition is the central drama of his philosophical development. In the years leading up to the 1905 Revolution, the opposition between the normative and the real was to him--as to the Kantians--a primary philosophical axiom. It mirrored his own vision of the Russian intelligentsia as a group charged with molding reality to conform to its moral ideals. The intelligentsia's actual conduct in 1905-1906, however, drove him to repudiate this vision, and with it, Kantian dualism. He was henceforth to uphold the view that reality was itself the source of all norms, which are grasped by the human mind in acts of intellectual intuition. ;Frank characterized his new conception of reality as "religious." But the last major modifications in his world-view were precipitated by his arguments with other "religious" thinkers of the post-1905 period. Reacting to their attacks on Western "rationalism," Frank was driven to reaffirm his commitment to science an indispensable component of culture, and to the validity of scientific knowing in its proper sphere. The Object of Knowledge was written to defend a conception of scientific and intuitive knowledge as parallel paths to the understanding of reality