Mamardashvili Merab

MERAB KONSTANTINOVICH MAMARDASHVILI was a Soviet philosopher, Doctor of Philosophical Sciences (1970), and professor (1972).

He was born in the city of Gori (Georgia) into a serviceman’s family. He spent his childhood in the Vinnytsia region, where his father was serving, until the beginning of the war. After the war began, the family was evacuated to Tbilisi. Merab studied at Secondary School No. 14 in Tbilisi and graduated with a gold medal. He then came to Moscow and entered the Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow State University, graduating in 1954. It should be said that, despite the postwar hardships and a very difficult political and ideological atmosphere, a real upsurge in philosophical education began at Moscow State University, associated with professors of the prerevolutionary school such as V. F. Asmus, A. F. Losev, A. S. Akhmanov, P. S. Popov, M. L. Dynnik, O. V. Trakhtenberg, A. R. Luria, and S. L. Rubinshtein. In the early 1950s, a number of sharp discussions on topical philosophical issues took place in Moscow, coinciding with and in many respects provoked by the removal from power and death of I. V. Stalin. In this “nutritive broth” at the Faculty of Philosophy, several informal groups emerged that later played a very important role in the restoration of philosophical thought in the USSR as a whole and in Russia in particular, namely the so-called “gnoseologists’ group” (E. V. Ilyenkov, V. I. Korovikov, and others) and the Moscow Logical Circle (later the methodological circle) (A. A. Zinovyev, B. A. Grushin, M. K. Mamardashvili, G. P. Shchedrovitsky, and others). M. Mamardashvili was one of the founders of the Moscow Logical Circle. After completing his postgraduate studies (1957), M. K. first worked in the editorial office of the journal Voprosy filosofii, where his first article, “The Processes of Analysis and Synthesis,” was published, and in 1961 he was sent to Prague