Background
Kol’man, Ernst was born on January 6, 1892 in Prague.
Kol’man, Ernst was born on January 6, 1892 in Prague.
University of Prague.
Institute of Philosophy, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 193945. Professor of Philosophy, Charles University, 1945-1948. Director, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences.
1959-1964.
Graham, Loren R. (1972) Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, New York: Alfred Knopf; revised edition. Science. Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union, Columbia University Press. 1987. Kol’man, E. (1979) Die verirrte Generation. So hdtten wir nicht leben sollen. Eine Biographie, Frankfurt. Scanlan, James P. (1985) Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey of Current Soviet Thought, Cornell University Press. Kol'man’s tumultuous life was marked by Marxian revolutionary commitment, devotion to the philosophy of science, and frequent conflict between the two and between both and Communist authorities. A military prisoner in Russia during the First World War, he joined the Bolsheviks and was a political organizer during the Russian Civil War, eventually becoming a Soviet citizen and occupying teaching and administrative positions at various institutions in Moscow, including the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences: in 1945 he returned to his native Czechoslovakia to become Professor of Philosophy at Charles University, but soon fell out with the new Communist government: deported to Russia in 1948, he was imprisoned there until 1952; rehabilitated after Stalin's death, he returned to Prague in 1959 to direct the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, but disputes with the government led him to take refuge in the USSR in 1964. Because of his subsequent support for political liberalization in the socialist countries and for philosophical liberalization in dialectical materialism, he was continually at odds with the Soviet government, and in 1976 he defected to Sweden and resigned his membership of the Communist Party. A staunch defender of Marxist dialectical materialism, Kol'man devoted much of his philosophical work to expounding that philosophy and examining its relation to the sciences. In the early decades ol his career he had a much-deserved reputation as a Marxist-Leninist ideologue; he championed the views of Lysenko in the genetics debates, and he vigorously supported the purging of Moscow State University of ‘idealists’, among whom he counted defenders of Einsteinian physics and the principle of complementarity in quantum theory Later, however, Kol’man was the first Soviet scholar to promote cybernetics, previously considered a ‘bourgeois’ science, and he urged Marxist philosophers to interpret dialectical materialism in the light of scientific developments rather than rejecting the latter as incompatible with dogma.