Background
Meliukhln, Serafim Timofeevich was born on June 6, 1927 in Tambovsk province, Russia.
Meliukhln, Serafim Timofeevich was born on June 6, 1927 in Tambovsk province, Russia.
Moscow State University and the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
From 1953, taught Philosophy at various institutions in Russia. From 1974, Head of the Department of Dialectical Materialism at Moscow State University.
Coming after a long period during which Soviet Marxist Leninist philosophers had rejected certain scientific theories as 'bourgeois' and incompatible with dialectical materialism. Meliukhin’s book Prohlema konechnogo i beskonechnogo (1958) reflected a new willingness to entertain Western cosmological theories such as Einstein's and a desire generally to accommodate dialectical materialism to advances in the sciences. Although not ready to accept relativity theory in its entirety, Meliukhin affirmed that it supports dialectical materialism in viewing space and time as inseparable from matter. Meliukhin’s subsequent writings contain similarly undogmatic reformulations of the requirements of dialectical materialism, focusing primarily on questions of the nature of matter and the structure of the physical universe. Meliukhin asserts that the orthodox Soviet conception of materialism, based on Lenin s insistence that being ‘objective reality’ is the only philosophically relevant property of matter, is actually a conception not of materialism but of realism; he advocates the construction of a new philosophical theory of matter in which its characteristics are derived not from the analysis of Lenin’s definition but from the findings of the sciences. Before the break-up of the USSR, Meliukhin also interpreted Lenin’s statement that matter is 'infinite in depth’ as signifying not that the components of matter are infinitely divisible but that there is an infinity of forms in which matter exists. Meliukhin’s views were criticized by Soviet traditionalists as lacking partisan commitment to Marxism-Leninism. Meliukhin’s less conservative approach to Marxism-Leninism contributed to the partial liberalization of Soviet philosophy in the decades after Stalin’s death, particularly after 1974 when he assumed the influential position of Head of the Department of Dialectical Materialism at Moscow State University. A significant feature of his approach wass the conviction that fields such as ethics, aesthetics and the history of philosophy should not all be subsumed under the rubric of dialectical and historical materialism, as the more partisan Marxist-Leninists had argued earlier, but should be considered separate philosophical disciplines.