Kozlov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich (1831–1901)

One of the forerunners of the idealist revival in Russian philosophy at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Aleksei Kozlov was the founder of Russian neo-Leibnizianism. In his system of ‘panpsychism’, which conceives all reality as psychic or conscious, he advanced a pluralistic idealism and metaphysical personalism that proved to be a considerable source of creativity in Russian philosophy. In his first and middle periods, the main influences on Kozlov were Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann and Kant. He then turned, in the mid-1880s, to Leibnizian monadology and Leibniz’s nineteenth-century followers, Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–81) and especially Gustav Teichmüller (1832–88), professor at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu). Apart from the significance of his own philosophical conceptions, Kozlov had an important developmental role in Russian philosophy, being one of the earliest defenders of speculative philosophy against the prevailing positivism. His essays in philosophical history and criticism performed a valuable educational service, especially in view of the fact that philosophy had been banned from the university curriculum in Russia between 1850 and 1863 and was still trying to recover.