Background
Shpet, Gustav Gustavovlch was born on March 26, 1879 in Kiev.
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Gustav Gustavovlch Shpet
Edit ProfileEducation
Universties of Kiev, Gottingen and Moscow.
Career
Taught Philosophy at Moscow University, 1910-1921. During the 1920s he held administrative positions in various scholarly institutes and organizations in Moscow.
Views
Study with Husserl at Göttingen in 1912 13 led to Shpet’s first book. Appearance and Sense, a sympathetic exposition of the German philosopher’s doctrine. Shpet was not an orthodox Husserlian, however, for his outlook was coloured by the ontological and realist tendencies of Russian philosophy and he approached phenomenology less as an analysis of transcendental subjectivity than as a reconstruction of reality as a living, concrete whole. He sought, moreover, to complete that reconstruction by attending to two elements neglected by Husserl—social being, and signs and the 'hermeneutical acts’ of consciousness by which signs are interpreted. Shpet emphasized the social character of consciousness and language, postulating a form of collective consciousness within which communication takes place. Shpet developed these themes in a series of further books, all completed within the period 1916-1927, addressed to problems in history, aesthetics, social psychology, literature and the general science of hermeneutics. On the strength of this work he is considered a pioneer in the development of semiotic studies in Russia. During the same period he also produced substantial works in the history of Russian philosophy. Shpet’s non-Marxist philosophical orientation cost him his professorship at Moscow University in 1921, and after 1927 he was no longer able to publish in philosophy. In 1935 he was exiled to Siberia: convicted there on fabricated charges of anti-Soviet activity, he was executed in 1937.
