Extracts from Idols and Ideals

Written by Evald Ilyenkov in 1968. Translation by Trevor Wilson.

The International Friends of Ilyenkov are grateful to Trevor for allowing us to publish this.

And out of interest, here’s an AI summary (6 pages) of the original (44 pages); in effect to see what AI ‘thinks’ of itself.

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E. V. Ilyenkov and V. I. Korovikov 1954
Theses on the Question of the Interconnection of Philosophy and Knowledge of Nature and Society in the Process of their Historical Development

In April 1954, Ilyenkov and his friend Valentin Korovikov, junior lecturers at Moscow State University, wrote these “theses on philosophy.” The theses were the subject of discussion at an open meeting of their department. The subsequent furore pitched Ilyenkov and Korovikov against the Soviet philosophical establishment, controlled by philosophers who had come to prominence at the height of Stalinism. Korovikov and Ilyenkov survived only when Khrushchev’s famous speech at the 20th Congress pushed the conflict into the background. The Theses were only discovered by Ilyenkov’s daughter, Elena Illesh, in 2016.

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Ilyenkov texts being studied

PDF of Dialectical Logic

A corrected, PDF of the The dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital Chapter 1

A corrected PDF of The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital Chapter 2

A PDF of The dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital Chapter 3

A PDF of The dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital Chapter 4

A corrected PDF of The dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital Chapter 5