Aleksandr Georgievich Spirkin (1918 - 2004)

Russian philosopher and psychologist

Spirkin was a Soviet and Russian philosopher and psychologist. He was born in Saratov Governorate and graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical University. In 1959 he received his doctorate in philosophy for a dissertation on the origin of consciousness. He became a professor in 1970, and a year later was elected Vice-President of the USSR Philosophical Society. On November 26, 1974, Alexander Spirkin became a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His principal works deal with the problems of consciousness and self-consciousness, worldview, and the subject matter, structure and functions of philosophy. Prof. Spirkin’s Fundamentals of Philosophy (1988; English translation 1990) expounding Marxist–Leninist philosophy in popular form was awarded a prize at a competition of textbooks for students of higher educational establishments. | - Source: Dialectical Materialism (1983/4) ISBN 0-7147-2010-0 || Reference: http://www.marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/index.html

Fundamentals of Philosophy

Spirkin: "The sages of India discovered astonishingly subtle and profound psycho-biophysical connections between human organism and cosmic subterranean processes. They knew much that even today is beyond the ken European scientific thought, or that it ignores, often trying to conceal its helplessness by asserting that oriental wisdom is mere mysticism, and thus showing its inability to distinguish the rational but not yet fully understandable essence from various figments of imagination…"