Background
Omel'ianovskii, Mikhail Erazmovich was born on January 19, 1904 in Kiev.
academic administrator philosopher
Omel'ianovskii, Mikhail Erazmovich was born on January 19, 1904 in Kiev.
Institute of Red Professors in Moscow and the Institute of Physics of Moscow University.
Taught and served as an administrator at Voronezh ChemicalTechnical Institute (1931-1944), the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1946-1955). One of the founders of the latter Institute and served as its Director, 1946-1952.
One of the most influential Soviet philosophers of science in the decades after the Second World War, Omel’ianovskii was a prominent figure in discussions of the relationship between dialectical materialism and modern theories in physics. His views were affected by the intensely ideological pressures of the late 1940s and 1950s, but after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Omel’ianovskii worked to liberalize dialectical materialism and facilitate communication between philosophers and scientists. Omel’ianovskii is best known for his philosophical discussions of the principles of quantum mechanics. In his 1947 book VI. Lenin ifizika XX veka [V. I. Lenin and Twentieth-Century Physics], he argued that Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle and Bohr’s principle of complementarity, properly understood, could be accepted by a dialectical materialist, but severe criticism caused him to repudiate the principle of complementarity in a volume published later in the same year in Kiev. His 1956 book was an ambitious attempt to develop a complete dialectical materialist version of quantum theory without appeal to complementarity. In subsequent years, however, he moved in the direction of his Soviet colleague V. A. Fock, and in his 1973 book he accepts complementarity as compatible with materialism and as reflecting a dialectical mode of thought.