Background
Tugarinov, Vasilil Petrovich was born on December 29, 1898 in Tver province, Russia.
Marxist dialectical materialist
Tugarinov, Vasilil Petrovich was born on December 29, 1898 in Tver province, Russia.
Moscow State University and the Communist Academy.
Taught Philosophy at various institutions of higher learning from 1939. From 1951, Professor of Philosophy at Leningrad University.
A confirmed Marxist-Leninist, Tugarinov did pioneering work in the elaboration of dialectical materialism as a philosophical system in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953. On a wide range of issues Tugarinov was one of the first Soviet philosophers to go beyond the simplistic dogmatism of the Stalin era to the construction of articulated and coherent philosophical theories consistent with the Marxist worldview. These issues included the nature of matter, on which Tugarinov defended a substantialist thesis over the objections of Engels and Lenin; the theoretical structure of dialectical materialism and historical materialism as systems of categories; the character, role and cognizability of laws in both nature and history; and the nature of the ‘social being' that, for Marx, determines social consciousness. On the last question, Tugarinov’s identification of social being with human life activity gave impetus to a new approach to historical materialism that focused on practical activity rather than on the relation between forces and relations of production. Tugarinov’s 1960 book O tsennostiakh zhizni i kul'tury [On the Values of Life and Culture] was the first Soviet work to pose the problem of investigating values philosophically, and it initiated the development of Soviet value theory, to which Tugarinov contributed with his 1968 book as well. Tugarinov argued that a Marxist axiology must avoid both subjectivism and absolutism: that could be accomplished, he thought, by analysing evaluational attitudes as derivative from cognitive attitudes.