Background
Vvedensky, Aleksandr Ivanovich was born in 1856 in Tambov province.
Vvedensky, Aleksandr Ivanovich was born in 1856 in Tambov province.
Studied Mathematics at the Universities of Moscow and St Petersburg. Changed to Philosophy at St Petersburg, studying under Vladislavlev, the first Russian translator of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
From 1890, Professor of Philosophy. University of St Petersburg.
Vvedensky was the foremost Russian neo-Kantian. The defining characteristic of his ‘logicist’ version of the critical philosophy was his insistence that the law of contradiction is only necessary or ‘naturalfor phenomena or ‘representations’, whereas it is ‘normative’ only for thought; he concluded that a priori knowledge, or science, is necessarily limited to phenomena. In this way he felt that he was giving a ‘new and easy proof of philosophical criticism’. But Vvedensky found it intolerable to be imprisoned in the world of phenomena, and looked to philosophy for a complete worldview. Although things in themselves are inaccessible to a priori cognition, their existence may be inferred from the ‘a posteriori elements’ of experience. He also allowed undemonstrated faith, associated with the ‘moral sense’, as a way other than knowledge of excluding doubt; but although he agreed with Kant that practical reason leads to faith in the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and freedom of the will, he believed that it also requires faith in the existence of other minds.