Background
Chlcherin, Boris Nikolaevich was born on May 26, 1828 in Tambov province.
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Boris Nikolaevich Chlcherin
Edit ProfileEducation
Graduated in Law at University of Moscow in 1849.
Career
Taught at University of Moscow, Professor of Russian Law from 1861.
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Born into a wealthy noble family, Chicherin was a noted jurist and historian as well as a philosopher. He was a liberal Westernizer in the 1850s, at the end of which decade he turned decisively against the radical intelligentsia. He resigned his Moscow University Chair in 1868 in protest at a violation of the statutes, and became involved in local liberal politics. He was also made to resign as mayor of Moscow in 1883 after a speech at the coronation of Alexander III commenting favourably on representative government. His liberalism was, however, tempered by a belief in a strong state. As a philosopher, Chicherin is regarded as the leading Russian exponent of right-wing Hegelianism. Like Solov’ev, he translated the absolute into the Christian Trinity, although he was critical in his Mysticism in Science (1880) of Solov’ev’s mystical conception of total-unity. Chicherin’s reworking of Hegel was distinctive, not least his replacement of the triadic dialectic with a tetradic sequence, beginning with an initial unity of universal and particular, followed by analytic or synthetic disintegration into multiplicity, and ending with a higher unity. He also insisted, more consistently with his political liberalism than with Hegel, that, as bearers of the absolute, human individuals were ends in themselves, and not simply organs of historical necessity. Having swum in the 1860s and 1870s against the positivist tide, Chicherin shared Solov’ev’s concern to establish science’s proper place in the hierarchy of knowledge leading to the absolute. He rejected the Comtean sequence of religion, metaphysics and science, arguing that science, while necessary for a full understanding of the absolute, was without metaphysics the most superficial kind of knowledge. Late in his life, he devised a theory of the structure of the atom, and opposed Darwinian natural selection with a Hegelian account of the evolution of organisms.
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Born
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Died
February 3, 1904 (aged 76) -
Nationality
Russian