Georgi Ivanovich Chelpanov

Georgi Ivanovich Chelpanov

Georgi Ivanovich Chelpanov ( Russian Георгий Иванович Челпанов , scientific. Transliteration Georgy Ivanovich Čelpanov ; April * 16 ^{. Jul} / 28. April  1862 ^greg. In Mariupol , † 13 February 1936 in Moscow ) was the founder of the first Russian research institute of experimental psychology , Logician and philosopher .

Life

Tschelpanow studied until 1887 in Odessa at the historical-philological faculty of Novorossiysk University . In 1890 he received an assistant professorship at the Moscow State University . Between 1897 and 1907 he was a professor at St. Vladimir University in Kiev and then he was a professor at Moscow University, where he headed the Institute of Philosophy. In 1914 he founded the Psychological Institute of Moscow University.

Act as a logician

Before the October Revolution , Chelpanov wrote a "textbook of logic" for high schools, in which traditional logic was described. Ten editions were published by 1918. After a question asked in 1946 about training in traditional logic, his textbook was reprinted with a few cuts and corrections in an edition of 100,000 copies. Chelpanov saw logic as the science of laws based on correct thinking. He took the view that it is not the problem of logic to discover new truths. Rather, it is their job to prove existing truths and to create rules with which logical errors can be avoided.

In the introduction to his logic textbook, the reader is first introduced to the characteristics of the forms of thinking. He equates the word “concept” with the terms “description” and “terminus”, referring to different objects or classes of objects. The “judgment” is defined by him as the union of terms. Something false or true is asserted in the judgment. However, he points out that the judgment does not always refer to objects of reality.

The nature of the laws is precisely described. He sees the goal of the law in showing how thinking must take place if it is to lead to the attainment of truth. For him, the identity proposition is not a law of thought but a law of being: every object is what it is . It says that a logical thought would not be realized if someone, after saying that A is equal to B, but when repeating this judgment no longer thinks of A, but refers to another.

The “conclusion” is defined by him as the derivation of a judgment from other judgments. He describes the “ syllogism ” as a final form in which two judgments are necessarily followed by a third, whereby one of the two given judgments is generally affirmative or generally negative. Tschelpanow criticizes John Stuart Mill for underestimating the role of deduction . He also rejects Stuart's view that the syllogism shows nothing new. According to Tschelpanow, when formulating the major clause, the focus of attention is not on the individual and that characteristic to which the minor clause refers .

He defines " induction " as a thought process through which a conclusion is drawn about what will be true in a special case or in special cases, as well as in all cases that are similar to the preceding ones. In the chapter on the methods of induction he lists the method of correspondence, the method of difference, the method of residues and that of the accompanying changes. The textbook ends with the treatment of the hypothesis, the classification, the analogy, the proof and the logical errors.

Philosophical conceptions

In Moscow he is the founder of the school of introspective psychology in Russia and establishes an institution for the study of this discipline, of which he is the head from 1912 to 1923. He is criticized by the psychologists Pawel Petrowitsch Blonski and Konstantin Nikolajewitsch Kornilow , who criticize his views related to idealism .

In his philosophical views he is close to neo-Kantianism . Tschelpanow advocated a dualistic theory of "empirical parallelism". In it he represents the theses according to which the psychological and physical phenomena exist simultaneously, parallel and independently of one another. The physical appearances, he claims, have no material causes, but arise from a very special source, the will, the soul and, in the last instance, from the divine idea, since the idea of ​​God primarily exists in man's consciousness, although sometimes it does not takes on clear form (1).

In his lecture held in Kiev in 1898/1899 he took the view that “space is just as subjective as sounds and colors” and that time only exists in our consciousness (2). In the struggle against materialism and in his neo-Kantian ideas, Chelpanov makes fideistic claims that “the field of knowledge and the field of belief are not enemies” (1).

Works

• (1) Vvedenije w philosofiju (Introduction to Philosophy), Kiev 1907, p. 513 (reprint: Moscow, 2009)
• (2) Mozg i Duscha, Moscow 1912, pp. 185 and 198 (reprint: Moscow, 2009)
• Utschebnik logiki, 1897 (reprint: Moscow, 1994)
• Brain and Soul, 1900 (Russian)
• The Problem of Spatial Perception in Connection with the Doctrine of Apriority and Innateness, 1896–1904 (Russian)
• Uschebnik psychologi, 1905–1906
• Vvedenie v eksperimentalnuju psychologiju (Introduction to experimental psychology), 1915

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography Georgi Ivanovich Tschelpanow on hrono.ru ; accessed on May 13, 2017 (Russian)