Lopatin, Lev Mikailovich (1855–1920)

In 1911 the Moscow Psychological Society celebrated the accomplishments of Lev Lopatin, a major Russian idealist and personalist philosopher. Lopatin was lauded for his chairmanship of the Psychological Society, the oldest learned society ‘uniting the philosophical forces of Russia’, and for his contributions to Russian philosophy: to the critique of positivism, to the development of Russian philosophical language and the history of philosophy in Russia, to the defence of idealism through his theories of ‘creative causation’ and the soul’s substantiality, to philosophical psychology, and to the strength and independence of Russian philosophic culture. Twenty-five years earlier the appearance of the first volume of Lopatin’s main work, Polozhitel’nye zadachi filosofii (The Positive Tasks of Philosophy), was indeed a milestone in the philosophical revolt against positivism and the development of Russian neo-idealism. In this and subsequent works Lopatin advanced his ‘system of concrete spiritualism’. His idea of the person as an ontologically grounded spiritual entity relates him to Leibniz’s monadology, and he is regarded as one of the main representatives of ‘neo-Leibnizianism’ in Russia, following Aleksei Kozlov. Another source of his ideas was his long-time friend the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solov’ëv, despite certain philosophical differences between them.