Background
Vernadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich was born on February 28, 1863 in St Petersburg.
Vernadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich was born on February 28, 1863 in St Petersburg.
Graduated in Physics and Mathematics at University of St Petersburg in 1885.
1890-1898, lecturer in Mineralogy and Crystallography. 1898-1911, Professor of Mineralogy, University of Moscow. 1915-1917, 1926-1930, Chair of Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Forces of Russia.
1922-1939,
Director of Radium Institute: 1927-1945, Director of the Biogeochemical Laboratory of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Born into a noble family, and son of a well-known liberal economist, Vernadsky joined a liberal student circle, and went on to become a prominent zemstvo liberal. He cofounded Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia [Union of Liberation] in 1903, and the Constitutional Democratic Party in 1905. He served on the State Council from 1906 to 1911, in which year he resigned his chair at the University of Moscow in protest against government interference. He was briefly Assistant Minister for Education in the Kerensky government. Unlike many non-Marxist scholars, he opted to remain in the new Soviet Union. First and foremost a scientist, Vernadsky was the founder of biogeochemistry, the study of the chemical composition and distribution of living matter. In the early 1900s he was the leading exponent in Russia of a ‘scientific worldview'. His position was more subtle than the uncompromising positivism of the Russian nihilists: although insisting on the reality of the world, he stressed the dubitability of most current scientific knowledge, and its nourishment by philosophical and religious ideas. He also linked both the nature and the development of science with democratic institutions. Vernadsky went on to develop a holistic worldview. Extrapolating from his scientific work on the exchange of matter between living and inert structures, he emphasized the ‘biosphere’ as a new geological stratum of living matter, and then, following Le Roy, added the ‘noosphere’ as a new stratum dominated by freely thinking humanity, radically changing the biosphere in its own interests. These ideas are now seen as anticipating some features of contemporary environmentalism. After the Revolution, Vernadsky resisted the encroachment of dialectical materialism on natural science, and in particular the appointment of Deborin and others to the Academy of Sciences in 1929. He engaged in a debate with Deborin in the early 1930s, during which he asserted his own ‘philosophical scepticism' in the face of charges of eclecticism and sympathy with religion and idealism. In the Stalinist era, Vernadsky was generally pilloried for advancing a vitalist variant of idealism, although after Stalin’s death Kedrov and others revived his philosophical ideas, attempting to demonstrate their compatibility with dialectical materialism. Although many of his writings were published for the first time, they were heavily censored. It was not until perestroika that his Philosophical Thoughts of a Naturalist (1988) was issued without cuts, and his assertion of the superiority of scientific knowledge to dialectical materialism made unambiguous.
