Background
Lossky, Nikolai Onufrlevich was born on December 6, 1870 in Kreslavka, Vitebsk province.
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Nikolai Onufrlevich Lossky
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Education
University of St Petersburg. Postgraduate under Windelband at Strasbourg and Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig.
Career
1907-1921, taught philosophy at University of St Petersburg, Professor of Philosophy, 1916-1921. 1942-1945, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bratislava. 1947-1950, Professor of Philosophy, St Vladimir Russian Orthodox seminary, New York.
Views
Lossky was expelled from his local gymnasium f°r his atheism. In 1921 he was deprived of his Chair of Philosophy at University of St Petersburg because of his religious beliefs, and in following year was among the Russian philoso phers exiled from the Soviet Union. He settled m Prague at the invitation of the statesman an historian of Russian ideas Tomás Masar) • remaining in Czechoslovakia until 1945. There after he lived in the United States and France. The starting-point of Lossky’s ‘intuitivism was his rejection of all causal or representado theories of knowledge: all objects of knowledg are immediately apprehended or intuited by subject and although the subject’s cognitive act o knowing is temporal, the 'epistemological coordination" between subject and object which is the necessary condition of knowing is itself outside space and time. Following Solov’ev, Lossky distinguished three kinds of intuition: sensory ^tuition of events in space and time; intellectual intuition of ideal objects, such as number and •ogical relations; and mystical intuition of the absolute, which is a metalogical being transcend- ■ng the laws of identity, contradiction and the excluded middle. Lossky intended his intuitivist epistemology to validate metaphysics. His own personalist ‘idealrealism’ was akin to Leibniz’s monadology, although he rejected the notion of a ‘windowless’ monad: rather, ‘everything is immanent in everything. Like Lopatin, Lossky avoided a pure Pluralism, and attributed to the absolute both the creation of a multiplicity of ‘substantival agents" and the preservation of their unity and consubstantiality. These agents exist outside of space and time, although space and time are their mode of activity’; and, according to his evolutionary doctrine of ‘hierarchical personalism’, they can achieve through the exercise of free will and by reincarnation a higher level of being. Thus a Proton may eventually become an ‘actual’ Person recognizing the existence of absolute valucs. and freely choosing the path to God rather than the path of egoism. Lossky appealed to mligious experience and revelation in identifying me absolute with the Christian Trinity, including Christ as the God-man; his conception of Sophia as the created world-spirit was more restricted man that of Bulgakov and Florensky. Lossky’s History of Russian Philosophy (1951) ‘s a valuable commentary on religious and idealist Philosophers, although it is he mirror image of Soviet histories in its scant way with secular thinkers.
