B

Babouvism

The 18th century French revolutionary movement for "a republic of equals"—a single national commune governed from a single centre. The movement took its name from its leader and most consistent theoretician, Gracchus Babeuf (1760-97). In 1796, Babeuf, and his companions (Buonarotti, Marechal, Antonelle, Darthe, Germain, Debon, Lepelletier, and others) organised the "Conspiracy of Equals", which was the culminating point of the movement. The conspiracy was uncovered and many of the participants were arrested and put on trial. Babeuf and Darthe were guillotined in 1797.

Babouvism signified the break-down of the alliance of exploited plebeians and the bourgeoisie that had taken shape during preparations for, and in the course of, the French Revolution. The instability of this alliance was obvious, for a bourgeois revolution could not give anything substantial to the most exploited section of the population. This was particularly clear at the time of the Thermidor reaction. Babouvism was the political and ideological reflection of the early separation of the pre-proletariat from the general plebeian mass that had participated in the French Revolution. The Babouvists were the ideological heirs of French 18th century materialism, of the ideas of Meslier on the popular revolution, of the "rationalist" communism of Morelly and of the organisational and ideological experience of the most radical trends in the French Revolution.

Babouvism was a step forward in the development of socialist thinking, since it came into being at a new stage in the socio-economic development of France, the stage at which capitalist relations were being consolidated. The Babouvists were the first to attempt to convert socialism from a theory into the practice of the revolutionary movement. In addition to their general statute of the future "Republic of Equals", the Babouvists elaborated a whole system of measures to improve the condition of the poor and overcome the resistance of counter-revolutionary forces. They put forward the idea of retaining the dictatorship of the working people after the victory of the revolution; they tried to define the main stages of the revolutionary transformation of society; they put forward the proposition that history is a struggle between the rich and the poor, patricians and plebeians, between masters and servants, between the sated and the hungry.

Although it possessed features of historical realism, Babouvism did not go beyond conspiracies in its tactics; for this reason the movement is regarded as utopian, although ideologically and organisationally Babeuf and his companions contributed to the development of socialism from a utopia into a science.

Bachofen, Johann Jakob (1815–1887)

Swiss historian of law and religion. His Das Mutterrecht (1861) was a pioneer work in the study of the history of the family, particularly the matriarchy, but his idealist outlook prevented him from discovering the real nature of family and marital relations and their development. He considered the evolution of religious ideas to be the driving force of history. His philosophy was comprehensively examined by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)

English philosopher, founder of the new materialism and experimental science. Under James I, attained the high position of Lord Chancellor. In 1620, published the famous treatise Novum Organum (the title was a reference to Aristotle's Organon), in which he evolved a new conception of the tasks of science and the foundations of scientific induction.

Declaring that the purpose of learning was to increase man's power over nature, Bacon maintained that this aim could be achieved only by learning which revealed the true causes of things. He, therefore, opposed scholasticism. The early learning had suffered either from "dogmatism", in the sense that the scholar starting from concepts of his own invention, wove his system of propositions in the same way as the spider weaves its web, or else it suffered from "empiricism", i.e., mere enumeration of unrelated facts. On these grounds Bacon called for scepticism with regard to all previous learning.

While admitting the possibility of acquiring true knowledge, he held that the method of doing so must be reformed. The first step towards this reform should be to cleanse the mind of the preconceptions and prejudices (Idols) by which it was constantly threatened. Some of these illusions were due to habits of mind characteristic of the whole human race, others to mental habits characteristic of the particular investigator or investigators, yet others stemmed from the imperfection and inaccuracy of language, and others, finally, were due to the uncritical acceptance of opinions. Having rid oneself of these bad habits of mind one could then adopt the true method of the new learning. This learning, according to Bacon, should be a rational elaboration of the facts of experience. The premisses for the conclusions of the new learning (media axiomata) would be propositions based on concepts arrived at through methodical generalisation or induction. Induction was based on analytical comprehension of experiment.

According to Engels, the one-sided development of Bacon's theory enabled him, and after him, Locke, to shift the metaphysical approach, which had taken shape in the 15th and 16th centuries, from natural science to philosophy. In his theory of induction Bacon was the first to point to the importance of what were called "negative instances", i.e., cases contradicting the generalisation and calling for its revision.

His contribution to the development of philosophy may be defined as follows. First, he restored the materialist tradition and reassessed the philosophical doctrines of the past from this standpoint; he praised early Greek materialism and revealed the errors of idealism. Secondly, he evolved his own materialist conception of nature, which he based on the idea that matter was a combination of particles, and nature a combination of bodies endowed with manifold properties. An essential quality of matter was motion, which Bacon did not confine merely to mechanical movement (he defined 19 types of motion).

Bacon's views reflected the new demands made upon learning in England in the age of primitive capital accumulation. But Bacon was not a consistent materialist. His teaching, as Marx notes, is full of "theological inconsistency". His political beliefs were reflected in the New Atlantis, a utopia in which an ideal society flourishes economically on the basis of science and an ingenious technology, while the antithesis between ruling and oppressed classes remains.

Bacon, Roger (c. 1214–1292)

English thinker of the Middle Ages, precursor of modern experimental science, ideologist of the town craftsmen. He exposed feudal customs, ideology, and politics. In 1277, Bacon was dismissed from teaching at Oxford University because of his heretical views and was confined to a monastery by order of the church authorities. His world outlook was materialist but not consistently so.

Condemning scholastic dogmatism and veneration of authority, he advocated the experimental study of nature and a new and independent approach to learning. He upheld experiment and mathematics as a means of obtaining knowledge, the aim of all learning being to increase man's power over nature. In spite of the traces of alchemist, astrological, and magical superstition that are to be found in his works, Bacon put forward a number of bold scientific and technical conjectures.

Baden School

One of the most influential Neo-Kantian schools in the early 20th century. The name derives from Heidelberg and Freiburg universities, both in the Land of Baden, at which Professors Windelband and Rickert taught the theory of the Baden School. Basically it amounted to counterposing the historic method to the natural scientific method; history, they said, is the science of individual facts of development which have cultural value; natural science is the study of the laws of natural phenomena which repeat themselves and are general. In neither case are concepts the reflection of reality. They merely convert reality into thought that is subordinated to a priori principles; natural science is the cognition of the general, history, the cognition of the individual.

The Baden School, following Kant, counterposes being to necessity. The denial of the laws of history, typical of the school, is associated with the theory of values. These theories were developed by H. Münsterberg (1863-1916) and E. Lask (1875-1915) and were applied to aesthetics by J. Cohn (1869-1947) and B. Christiansen, and to sociology by Weber. In modern German sociology the ideas of the Baden School are being developed in a spirit of out-and-out subjectivism and voluntarism, which is opposed to Marxism. This school of sociology in West Germany is headed by W. Theimer and G. Ritter.

Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich (1814–1876)

Russian petty-bourgeois revolutionary, an aristocrat by birth, ideologist of anarchism; in philosophy he was an eclecticist. From 1836 to 1840, Bakunin lived in Moscow, where he studied Fichte and Hegel, interpreting the philosophy of the latter in a conservative spirit in his Gimnazicheskiye rechi Gegelya. (Predisloviye perevodchika) [Hegel's Gymnasium Speeches. (Translator's Preface)], 1838. In 1840, Bakunin emigrated and joined the Young Hegelians (Reaktsiya v Germanii [Reaction in Germany], 1842), taking part in the revolution of 1848-50 in Prague and Dresden. Returning to Russia, he was imprisoned in 1851 and in 1857 exiled to Siberia. In 1861, he escaped and spent the sixties and seventies in Western Europe, where he collaborated with Herzen and Ogaryov. He took an active part in organising the anarchist movement and fought against Marxism in the First International, from which he was expelled in 1872. Four years later he died in Berne.

Bakunin's theory took final shape at the end of the sixties (Gosudarstvennost i anarkhiya [Statehood and Anarchy], 1873, et al.). Bakunin's basic concept is that the chief oppressor of man is the state, which relies on the fiction of God. Religion is "collective madness", the ugly product of the consciousness of the oppressed masses, and the church is a "celestial tavern", in which the oppressed seek to forget their daily misfortunes. To lead mankind to the "kingdom of freedom" it is first necessary to "blow up" the state and exclude the principle of authority from the people's life.

Bakunin believed implicitly in the socialist instincts and inexhaustible spontaneous revolutionary spirit of the masses, mainly the peasantry and lumpenproletariat; he denied the need to prepare for revolution and plunged headlong into revolutionary adventures. Unable to grasp the significance of the application of scientific method to the theory of society, he opposed the Marxist teaching on the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the seventies Bakunin's anarchist ideas were widespread among the revolutionary Narodniks of Russia and also in other economically poorly developed countries (Italy, Spain, and others). Bakunin's anarchist theories were criticised by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Basis and Superstructure

Concepts of historical materialism that reveal the connection between economic social relations and all other relations within a given society. The Basis is the totality of production relations that make up the economic structure of society. The concepts "Basis" and "production relations" are synonymous but not identical. The concept "production relations" is correlated with the concept "productive forces", while the concept "Basis" is correlated with the concept "Superstructure".

The Superstructure includes ideas, organisations and institutions. Superstructural ideas include political, legal, moral, aesthetic, religious, and philosophical views, which are also termed forms of social consciousness. All forms of social consciousness reflect economic relations in one way or another; some of them, e.g., political and legal forms of consciousness, reflect economic relations directly; others are indirect reflections—e.g., art, philosophy. These latter are connected with the economic Basis through such links as politics. Superstructural relations include ideological relations. Unlike production relations, which take shape independently of human consciousness, ideological relations do not take shape until they have entered the consciousness.

Although superstructural phenomena are determined by the Basis, they are relatively independent in their development. Certain organisations and institutions are connected with each form of social consciousness—political parties are connected with political ideas, state institutions, with political and legal ideas, the church and church organisations, with religion, etc.

Each socio-economic formation has a definite Basis and a corresponding Superstructure. Marxist historians make a distinction between Basis and Superstructure of the slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, and communist societies. Changes in the Basis and Superstructure result from the change of one socio-economic formation into another. Superstructure undergoes a certain evolution within a single formation; e.g., during the transition to imperialism Superstructure shows signs of increased reaction; under socialist conditions the political Superstructure develops increasingly democratic forms of organisation. An example of this is the transformation of the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat into a state governed by the whole people during the period of the full-scale construction of communism.

Superstructure, which is brought into being by the economic Basis and is its reflection, is not passive. It plays an active role in the historical process and affects it in all its aspects, including the economic, to which it owes its existence. In a society based on private property, Basis and Superstructure have an antagonistic structure. In capitalist society, for instance, there is a fierce ideological struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and between the political, moral, philosophical and other views of these classes. The antagonistic nature of Superstructure in a society split into classes determines the opposite roles of the ideology of the classes in respect of the economic Basis. In capitalist society the bourgeois political Superstructure with bourgeois ideas about liberty, equality, etc., actively serves the economic Basis of capitalism, while proletarian ideology and proletarian organisations are directed towards the abolition of the economic foundations of capitalism.

It is only in socialist society, where production relations are free of antagonisms, that Superstructure becomes more homogeneous in the social sense and serves a common cause—the consistent improvement and development of the economic Basis of socialism.

Baturin, Pafnuty Sergeyevich (c. 1740–1803)

Russian enlightener, deist; author of Issledovaniya knigi o zabluzhdeniyakh i istine (A Study of the Book of Errors and Truth), 1790, Kratkoye povestvovaniye o aravlyanakh (A Short Account of the Arabs), 1787, et al. The Study is a philosophical polemic which analyses the ideas of the mystic Saint-Martin contained in Des erreurs et de la vérité ou des hommes rappelés au principe universel de la science. Baturin's book was almost the only work which criticised the religious mysticism of the masons, whose ideological equipment included the above book by Saint-Martin.

On the basis of natural science as known in his day, Baturin gave a materialist explanation of natural phenomena, defended the idea of heliocentrism in cosmogony, and the law of the conservation of matter and motion, and defended the materialist theory of knowledge, giving a prominent place to observation and experimental data. Baturin rejected the teaching of the mystics on non-corporeal substance. Baturin's materialism was metaphysical in character and deist in form. Baturin championed education and the development of the natural sciences and was in favour of "good" legislation and humanism.

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1714–1762)

German philosopher, disciple of Leibniz and Wolff. In Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735) he introduced the term "aesthetics" to describe the study of man's sensory knowledge of the beautiful and its expression in artistic forms, as opposed to logic, which is concerned with knowledge acquired through reason. His unfinished Aesthetica (Vol. 1, 1750, Vol. 2, 1758) treats of the problems of knowledge acquired through the senses. Though Baumgarten cannot be regarded as the founder of aesthetics as a science, his introduction of the concept was prompted by the thought of the day in this field and was widely adopted.

Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706)

Publicist, philosopher of scepticism, representative of the French Enlightenment. Professor of philosophy at Sedan Academy and Rotterdam University. He carried on a polemic with Catholicism and eventually turned away from religion and advocated religious toleration. Although he was never an atheist, the character of his indifference to religion was aptly described by Voltaire, who remarked that though Bayle might not be an unbeliever himself, he made unbelievers of others. Bayle launched the critical study of Christian doctrine as a variety of mythology.

His arguments were based on the scepticism which had originated from the Cartesian principle of doubt and which, according to Marx, undermined all faith in metaphysics and theology. Bayle suggested that ethical problems, instead of being determined by religion, should be examined from the standpoint of natural reason. He argued that it was possible for a society to be composed entirely of atheists. His writings, particularly his major work, the Dictionnaire historique et critique, paved the way for the French materialism of the 18th century.

Beautiful, The

An aesthetical category reflecting and assessing phenomena of reality and works of art affording man the feeling of aesthetical enjoyment, embodying in an object-sensory form the freedom and fulness of creative and cognitive forces and the capabilities of man in all fields of social life: labour, socio-political, and spiritual.

Idealism (Plato, Kant, Hegel) regarded the Beautiful as a property of the spirit, of consciousness (objective or subjective). Pre-Marxist materialism upheld the objectivity of the Beautiful, but not infrequently, owing to its contemplativeness, reduced the Beautiful to a pure natural quality (symmetry, harmony of the parts and the whole, man as a natural creature, etc.). Chernyshevsky put forward an original and revolutionary definition of the Beautiful as life, as the complete manifestation of life.

The concept Beautiful bears an historical character and has a different content for different classes. Dialectical and materialist aesthetics proceeds from the fact that the Beautiful is a product of social and historical practice. It comes into being and develops when man as a social being (according to the measure the objective laws are cognised) realises more completely and freely in the given historical conditions his creative talents and capabilities, when he is the master of the objects of the sensory world, enjoys labour as the play of his physical and intellectual forces.

The Beautiful finds a synthesised and complete expression in works of art and artistic images. The Beautiful in life and art, providing spiritual joy and pleasure, acquires a great cognitive and educational role in society. A beautiful work of art is one which, from the point of view of a progressive aesthetical ideal, truly reproduces reality. In contemporary conditions the truly Beautiful arises only in the course of the struggle for the revolutionary reconstruction of society. Favourable socio-economic conditions for the working people to create works of beauty and to acquire a fuller ability to appreciate the Beautiful can only be established by communism.

Bebel, August (1840–1913)

One of the founders of the German Social-Democratic Party, outstanding propagandist and theoretician of Marxism, an exponent of historical materialism. His study of the problem of woman's place in society is of particular value. In Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879) he showed that family relations change as the mode of production changes, and that women's social inequality is due to the domination of private property. The emergence of private property led to the "belittling and even contempt of women". Their emancipation is, therefore, an aspect of the general problem of abolishing exploitation and social oppression.

A militant atheist, Bebel analysed religious teaching and showed that religion promised only an ephemeral happiness, that it created an illusion that was useful to the ruling classes as a "means of domination". He was an active opponent of bourgeois ideology and exposed Malthusianism, philosophical idealism, and revisionism. He was one of the first to realise that the views of Bernstein were fundamentally hostile to the proletariat. Although he committed certain tactical mistakes and was wrong in some of his propositions, both his theoretical and practical work contributed enormously to the workers' struggle against social oppression.

Behaviourism

A trend in modern psychology, based philosophically on pragmatism. Behaviourism was originated in 1913 by J. B. Watson (1878–1958) of Chicago University, the experimental material being provided by the research into the behaviour of animals carried out by E. L. Thorndike (1874–1949). Watson's theory was shared by K. S. Lashley (1890–1958), A. P. Weiss (1879–1931), and others.

Behaviourism continues the mechanistic trend in psychology, reducing psychological phenomena to the reactions of the organism. It identifies consciousness with behaviour, regarding the relation between stimulus and reaction as its basic unit. Knowledge, according to Behaviourism, is entirely a matter of the conditioned reactions of organisms (including man).

In the thirties Watson's theory was superseded by a number of neo-behaviourist theories known broadly as "conditioning". Their leading exponents were Clark Hull (1884–1952), Edward Tolman (b. 1886), and Edwin Guthrie (1886–1959). These theories developed under the influence of Pavlovian teaching. Having borrowed I. Pavlov's terminology and classification of forms of behaviour, the neo-behaviourists substituted operationism and logical positivism for the materialist foundations of his doctrine. While concentrating on conditioned reflexes, they ignore the role of the cerebral cortex in behaviour.

Contemporary Behaviourism has modified the stimulus-reaction formula by inserting what are called "intermediate variables" (skill, stimulation and inhibition potential, need, etc.). This does not, however, change the mechanistic and idealist nature of Behaviourism.

Being

1. A philosophical concept denoting the objective world, matter, which exists independently of consciousness. Regarding the materiality of the world and its Being as identical, dialectical materialism rejects the idealist conception of Being as something that exists before matter or independently of it, as well as idealist attempts to make Being a product of the act of consciousness. On the other hand, it is not enough to stress only the objectivity of Being, because in that case the problem of the material or ideal character of Being remains unsolved. While recognising Being as primary and consciousness as secondary, dialectical materialism nevertheless interprets consciousness as something more than a passive reflection of being, and regards it as an active force which influences Being.

2. The most abstract concept denoting existence in general. In this sense Being must be distinguished from reality, existence, actuality, etc., which are more concrete and more profound definitions of objective processes and phenomena.

Being, Social

A philosophical category denoting the material life of society. It is primary in relation to social consciousness and exists outside and independently of social consciousness. The material life of society comprises the production of material goods and the material relations which take shape between people in the process of production and the concrete practical life of society.

Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich (1811–1848)

Russian revolutionary democrat, literary critic, founder of Russian realist aesthetics. His appearance heralded the complete supersession of the nobility by the raznochintsy (middle-class and professional people) in the Russian liberation movement. Born in Sveaborg in the family of a doctor, he read literature at Moscow University from 1829 to 1832. In 1833 he joined the magazine Teleskop, which published in its supplement (Molva) his first important article, "Literary Aspirations" (1834). From 1838 to 1839 he edited the magazine Moskovsky Nablyudatel; he moved to St. Petersburg at the end of 1839, where he took over the department of literary criticism in the magazine Otechestvenniye zapiski. In 1846, he became chief critic for the Sovremennik but for medical reasons was obliged to go abroad in 1847. He died of tuberculosis in St. Petersburg the following year.

Ideologically, his work belongs to the period when Russian social thinkers were only just beginning to seek new ways of fighting the autocracy and serfdom, and to evolve a scientific theory of social development. Hence the extreme complexity and intensity of his ideological evolution. By the 40s he had arrived at a revolutionary democratic outlook that reflected the mood of the peasantry, and had become deeply interested in socialism, atheism, and materialism. This led him to formulate his attitude to the philosophical and socio-political doctrines of the 19th century (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, the Young Hegelians, the French utopian socialists, and the early Marx).

Belinsky wrote no philosophical treatises, but all his major essays deal with philosophical problems. An ardent supporter of Hegel between 1837 and 1839, he interpreted his dictum "was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig" (what is real is reasonable) in a spirit of political conservatism, of reconciliation with the Russian autocracy. But even in this period, which ended when Belinsky proposed the idea of negation, the principle of struggle against all that is obsolescent and unreasonable, his thinking was directed mainly towards understanding the laws that control the life of man and of society as a whole.

In the early 40s Belinsky took up a materialist stand. Discussing the problem of the unity of the material and the ideal, he argued that the "spiritual" is "nothing but the activity of the physical". At the same time he stressed the active role played by consciousness in the process of interaction between man and his environment. Rejecting the conservatism of the Hegelian system, Belinsky perceived in dialectics the basis of a method of scientific research and revolutionary action, the seed of a genuine "philosophy of history".

Objective law, which he defined as the necessity of social progress operating through the sum total of human activity and expressing itself in the actions of great men, occupies a central place in his thinking. It was at the bottom of his approach to the problems of Russian history (role of Peter I, etc.), and its relation to the processes of world history. It was the core of his interpretation of the correlation between ideal and reality.

Welcoming the socialist conception of a just society where "there will be no rich and no poor, no tsars and no subjects, but where there will be brothers, human beings", Belinsky was nevertheless sceptical about the reformist projects of some West European socialists. He maintained that it was unlikely that the new society could be established "by time alone, without violent upheavals, without bloodshed". However, he himself did not achieve a scientific perception of the inevitability of socialism. Hence his appeal to the ideas of primitive Christianity as the basis for the morality of the future.

He acknowledged the progressive nature of the bourgeois system compared with feudalism, and considered that the immediate social tasks facing Russia were the destruction of the patriarchal, serf-owning forms of life (above all, serfdom itself) and the enactment of a number of bourgeois democratic reforms. With this as his point of departure Belinsky waged a ruthless campaign against the retrograde ideas of "official reflection of the people's feelings" and ridiculed the Slavophile idealisation of Russia's patriarchal past.

His revolutionary democracy found its most consistent expression in his "Letter to Gogol" (July 1847), one of the finest works of the uncensored Russian democratic press of the 19th century. In this letter Belinsky severely criticised the autocracy and the Orthodox Church, calling for the immediate abolition of serfdom, and attacking monarchist, religious ideology.

Historicity is characteristic of his aesthetic judgements. Regarding it as the essence and specifics of art to reproduce the typical features of reality through imagery, Belinsky inveighed against reactionary romanticism and didactic fiction and advocated the principles of realism underlying the work of Pushkin and the "natural school" led by Gogol. Pointing to the connection between the concepts of kinship with the people and realism in art, he advanced important propositions on the social significance of literature being dependent on its ability to bridge the gap between educated "society" and the mass of the people, and on "sympathy with contemporaneity", i.e., with progress, as a quality essential to the true artist. Belinsky's views on art form an important contribution to the development of aesthetics.

Bellers, John (1654–1725)

English petty-bourgeois utopian, economist, and philanthropist. His work anticipated the labour theory of value. Unlike the mercantilists, he stressed the need to increase the productivity of labour and change the existing mode of production. He was one of the first to propose the idea of agricultural cooperation. In Proposals for Raising a College of Industry of All Useful Trades and Husbandry (1695) he evolved a plan for producer co-operation based on collective ownership of the means of production and rational organisation of labour on the principle "he who does not work, neither shall he eat". He advocated social insurance and vocational education.

Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832)

English moralist and writer on law. In his theory of ethics Bentham reduced all the motives of human conduct to either pleasure or pain, identifying morality with the utility of an action (see Utilitarianism). Morality could thus be calculated mathematically by balancing the pleasure against the pain that would accrue as the result of any particular action. This metaphysical and mechanistic approach to morality (the hedonic calculus) led him to defend capitalist society, since he declared the satisfaction of one's private interests (the principle of egoism) to be the means of providing "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" (principle of altruism). He criticised the theory of natural law. While rejecting "natural religion" with its concept of God based on an analogy with earthly rulers, he defended "revealed religion". As regards epistemology, he was a nominalist. On the basis of one of Bentham's manuscripts, Boole formulated the theory of the quantification of the predicate. His main work was Deontology or the Science of Morality (1834).

Berdyayev, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1874–1948)

Russian bourgeois mystical philosopher, existentialist, founder of the so-called "new Christianity", ideologist of Vekhism. He began as an exponent of "legal Marxism", but by 1905 his "critical appraisal" of Marxism had developed into direct opposition to revolution, while his Neo-Kantian enthusiasms had led him to God-seeking and mysticism. To the class struggle for the liberation of the workers Berdyayev counterposes an "inner", "spiritual" liberation of the personality by way of religion (Filosofiya Svobody [Philosophy of Freedom], 1911; Smysl Tvorchestva [The Meaning of Creativity], 1916, etc.).

After the October Revolution of 1917, Berdyayev (now an emigre) set out to perfect a theory that would bring wavering intellectuals into the fold of mysticism. Capitalism was declared an "inhuman system", the old Christianity a "weapon of exploitation", and even the "truth of communism" was recognised to the extent that it rested on socialisation of production. At the same time Berdyayev claimed that Marxism could not solve the problem of the activity and freedom of the personality because it obscured the individual under the concept of class. This problem, according to Berdyayev, is solved by Christian existentialism or personalism. He maintains that the "existence" of the subject, whose creativity is based on "absolute freedom" derived from the "abyss" (a borrowing from Bohme), is the only reality; the substance of this creativity is the so-called "dialectics of theo-humanity", the mystery of the "birth of God in man and man in God" (borrowed from Dostoyevsky). Berdyayev places the realisation of this "theo-human creativity" in the so-called "new Middle Ages", the after-life in the "fourth dimension", all earthly creative work being regarded as futile (Ya i mir obyektov [I and the World of Objects], 1934; Opyt eskhatologicheskoi metafiziki, Tvorchestvo i obyektivatsiya [Experience of Eschatological Metaphysics. Creation and Objectivation], 1947, etc.).

The reactionary nature of Berdyayev's philosophy shows up most of all in his main work Filosofiya neravenstva [Philosophy of Inequality], 1918, published in 1923, in which social inequality is declared beneficial and right, and war the basis of the creative movement of humanity.

Bergson, Henri (1859–1941)

French idealist philosopher, representative of intuitionism. In 1900, he became a professor of the College de France, and in 1914, was elected to the Academy. The central concept of Bergson's idealism is "pure", i.e., non-material, "duration", the basis and origin of all things. Matter, time, and motion are the various forms in which we conceive "duration". Knowledge of duration can be obtained only by intuition, understood as mystical "perception" or "knowing", in which "the act of knowing coincides with the act that creates reality".

To dialectics Bergson counterposes his doctrine of "creative evolution", based on the universalisation of concepts borrowed from biological idealism (see Vitalism). In his views on society Bergson justified the oppression of one class by another as a "natural" condition, and war as an inevitable "law of nature". His philosophy is a vivid expression of irrationalism. Main works: Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Matière et Mémoire (1896), L'évolution créatrice (1907), La pensée et le mouvant (1934), etc.

Berkeley, George (1685–1753)

English philosopher, subjective idealist. In 1734, he became Bishop of Cloyne (Ireland). His main work was A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Proceeding from the premise that man perceives nothing directly except his "ideas" (sensations), Berkeley concluded that things exist only insofar as they can be perceived (esse est percipi). According to Berkeley, ideas are passive. They are perceived by an incorporeal substance, the soul, which is active and can also produce ideas.

In an effort to avoid solipsism, Berkeley recognises a multiplicity of spiritual substances, and also the existence of the "cosmic mind", God. Ideas, he says, exist potentially in the mind of God, but actually exist only in the human mind. Later Berkeley took up objective idealist positions close to NeoPlatonism and acknowledged the eternal existence of ideas in the mind of God. In an attempt to disprove atheism and materialism, Berkeley attacked the concept of matter as ridden with internal contradictions and useless in the quest for knowledge. The basis of his criticism of matter was idealist nominalism. He rejected Locke's theory of primary and secondary qualities and declared all qualities to be subjective.

Denying the ability of science to conceive of the world as a whole, Berkeley considered the task of the scientist to be the "searching after and endeavouring to understand this language... of the Author of nature and not the pretending to explain things by corporeal causes". On these grounds he repudiated Newton's theory of absolute space and attacked his theory of gravitation as a doctrine on the natural cause of the motion of material bodies, whereas, according to Berkeley's own philosophy, only spiritual substance could be active. He disapproved of Leibniz and Newton's infinitesimal calculus, since to recognise the infinite divisibility of "real space" would contradict the basic postulate of his philosophy.

Since the middle of the 19th century, attempts have been made to revive Berkeley's philosophy and he has been borrowed from by many idealist schools; the immanence school, empirio-criticism, pragmatism, and so on. The philosophy of Berkeley and his 20th century followers was criticised by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Bernal, John Desmond (1901–1971)

British physicist, public figure. Member of the Royal Society (since 1937), and the Academies of several countries, including the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (since 1958), Lenin International Peace Prize winner (1953). Besides his research in physics, biochemistry, and crystallography, Bernal has written various works (The Social Function of Science, 1939; Science and Society, 1953; Science in the History of Society, 1954), in which he gives a general summing up of the achievements of science as a whole, revealing its philosophical significance and role in human history, the contradictions of its development in a society based on exploitation and its steady progress under socialism. His analysis of the history of science is based on dialectical materialism.

In his book World Without War (1958), he discusses the prospects of the peaceful use of scientific discoveries for the benefit of humanity.

Bernstein, Eduard (1850–1932)

German Social-Democrat, founder of revisionism as a systematic theory and initiator of reformism in the working-class movement. In a series of articles entitled Problems of Socialism and the Tasks of Social-Democracy (1897-98) he revised the basic postulates of Marxism in philosophy, political economy, and the theory of scientific socialism. Proclaiming the slogan "Back to Kant", Bernstein repudiated any consistent materialist solution of the fundamental problem of philosophy, treating Marxist and Hegelian dialectics as identical. He denied the very possibility of scientific socialism, and regarded socialism as a mere moral and ethical ideal.

Rejecting the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, he advocated the theory of the dying away of the class struggle and refused to recognise any goal for the working class except the winning of minor reforms within the framework of capitalism. Hence his well-known dictum: "The end... is nothing, movement is everything." Plekhanov did much to disprove Bernstein's revisionist ideas. Bernstein's followers in Russia, the Economists and Mensheviks, and also the revisionists in the international movement, were exposed by Lenin.

Bhutavada (elementalism)

A trend in ancient Indian materialism. Probably arose about the 1st century A.D. In some sources it is regarded as a variety of the Lokayata. According to the doctrine of Bhutavada, all qualitative differences between objects result from the different combination of the material elements of which they are formed. Consciousness is the result of a peculiar combination of material elements which, once it has occurred, can reproduce combinations similar to itself, but these other combinations can never cause consciousness. Like the advocates of the Lokayata, the followers of Bhutavada were sensualists in epistemology and hedonists in ethics.

Biogenetic Law

A biological law which states that each organism in the process of its individual development (ontogenesis) repeats certain features and peculiarities through which its ancestors passed in the process of evolution (phylogenesis). The term was introduced by Haeckel in 1866, although the fact had been remarked on earlier (by the German natural philosopher Oken, the Russian biologist K. Rulye, and others). It was Darwin, however, who made a fundamental investigation of the relationship between ontogenesis and phylogenesis. The methodological significance of the Biogenetic Law is that it "has given the theory of evolution its most secure basis" (Engels). The Biogenetic Law was a confirmation by natural science of the qualitative development from the simple to the complex, a confirmation of the theory of evolution.

Attempts to apply Biogenetic Law to the mental development of the individual (Baldwin, Stanley, Hall, Freud, and others) arise from the unsound, mechanical interpretation of social phenomena through biological laws.

Biological School in Sociology

A sociological trend, popular in the second half of the 19th and the early years of the 20th centuries. Its basic postulates rest on the mechanical application of the laws of biology (survival of the fittest, natural selection, cell structure of the organism, etc.) to the life of human society; the Biological School in Sociology also made use of the ideas of Malthusianism, eugenics, and racialism. The attempt to explain social phenomena in terms of biology is unscientific. As Lenin wrote, "... the transfer of biological concepts in general to the sphere of the social sciences is phrase-mongering" (Vol. 14, p. 329).

The class essence of this doctrine lies in the desire to overshadow the real laws of social life by treating man as a purely biological creature, supposedly endowed with "inalterable instincts" of private ownership, individualism, and so on (see also Anthroposociology, Social-Darwinism; Society, Organic Theory of).

Biology

The study of life. Biology deals with life as a special form of the motion of matter, the laws of the development of living nature, and also with the manifold forms of living organisms, their structure, function, evolution, individual development, and interrelation with the environment. Biology includes the individual sciences of zoology, botany, physiology, embryology, paleontology, microbiology, genetics, etc.

As a harmonious system of knowledge, Biology was known to the ancient Greeks, but it acquired a scientific basis only in modern times. The first relatively complete systematisation of living and extinct organisms was made by John Ray (17th century) and Linnaeus. In the 17th, 18th, and the first half of the 19th centuries Biology was mainly descriptive. Engels called this period metaphysical, its theoretical basis being the idea of the permanence of species, a belief that the purposefulness of organisms is due to supernatural causes. Ignorance of the material causes of biological phenomena and failure to perceive their specific features gave rise to idealist and metaphysical conceptions (vitalism, preformationism, mechanism, etc.).

The discovery of the cellular structure of living creatures played an important part in establishing Biology as a science. It was revolutionised by Darwin's theory of evolution, which revealed the basic factors and motive forces of evolution and proposed and substantiated the materialist view of the relative expediency of living organisms, thus undermining the former domination of teleology in biological theories. Important successes were achieved in the biological sciences at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. But Biology has made particularly rapid progress since the appearance of such branches as physiology, genetics, cytology, biochemistry, and biophysics, which are concerned with the laws of the basic vital processes—nutrition, reproduction, metabolism, transmission of inherited characteristics, etc.

At the points where Biology links up with other sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc.) there are possibilities of a break-through in a number of important biological fields. The central problem of Biology today is to discover the essence of the vital processes, to investigate the biological laws of the development of the organic world, to study the physics and chemistry of living things, to evolve various ways of controlling the vital processes, particularly metabolism, heredity, and the mutation of organisms.

Physical, chemical, and mathematical methods of research have achieved fundamental results in various fields, primarily in genetics, where the material vehicles of heredity, genes, have been discovered, their structure and functions deciphered, and a general picture obtained of the mechanics of the transmission of inherited characteristics. Over the past twenty years various methods of investigating the structure of proteins have been devised, and the simplest proteins have been synthesised. Biologists working in co-operation with chemists and physicists have made considerable progress in deciphering the mechanics of the biosynthesis of proteins. The explanation of many biological phenomena, particularly those of heredity, has been discovered in the chemical processes of the living cell. This has led to what is called molecular biology, which has stimulated the development of a number of other biological sciences.

The progress in Biology has brought further clarity to Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwin's conception of the causes of the variation of species has been made more precise by the elucidation of the nature of mutations on a molecular level. From the standpoint of modern Biology mutations caused by the environment are the main factor in organic evolution, the principle motive force being natural selection. Progress in Biology may be equalled to the utilisation of nuclear energy: it is making a key contribution to economic advance.

Considerable successes in plant physiology (see Timiryazev), animal physiology (see I. Pavlov), and selection and seed breeding (see Michurin), achieved by biologists of the materialist school, have contributed much to the theory and practice of agriculture.

Biosphere

That part of the Earth in which life exists and which is thus endowed with a special geological and physico-chemical organisation. The concept was introduced by Eduard Suess and developed by Vernadsky. Vernadsky visualised the origin of life on Earth and the formation of the Biosphere not as the appearance of separate embryos at separate, isolated points, but as a powerful and unified process forming the "monolith" of life and encompassing every part of the planet where the right conditions obtain. With the appearance of human society and the development of science and technology the Biosphere evolves into the noosphere.

Blanqui, Louis-Auguste (1805–1881)

French utopian communist. Took part in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, was twice sentenced to death, and spent nearly half his life in prison. Blanqui's world outlook was formed under the influence of the mechanistic materialism, atheism, and rationalism of the 18th century, and also of utopian socialism, particularly Babouvism. Though a materialist in his general philosophical outlook, Blanqui gave an idealist explanation of historical progress as the dissemination of enlightenment. He believed that history was essentially a progress from the absolute individualism of savages through various phases towards communism, a "future society", which would be the "crown of civilisation".

At the same time Blanqui was aware of the struggle between social forces in history and sharply criticised the contradictions of capitalist society. His conspiratorial tactics were erroneous and led to the failure of the actions undertaken by his supporters. Blanqui failed to realise that a revolution could be successful only if it was carried out by the mass of the working people led by a revolutionary party. Blanquism influenced the revolutionary movement in other countries, particularly in Russia (see Narodism). Blanqui is praised for his revolutionary services by the founders of Marxism-Leninism, but his tactics are criticised. His main work was Critique sociale (1885).

Bochenski, Joseph (1902–1995)

Neo-Thomist and Dominican, became professor of philosophy at Freiburg University, Switzerland, in 1945. As a historian and theorist of logic, Bochenski specialises in distorting Marxism and Soviet philosophy.

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (480–524)

Late Roman philosopher. Though formally representative of Neo-Platonism, his philosophy is remarkable for its eclecticism and a leaning towards the exact sciences; in its moral aspects it is close to stoicism. Boethius translated and interpreted Aristotle's works on logic and also Porphyry's Introduction to and Commentary on the Categories. Boethius also translated Euclid and gave an interpretation of the Introductio Arithmetica by Nicomachus. He also wrote a treatise containing a carefully elaborated theory on the music of ancient Greece. The stoical De Consolatione Philosophiae is considered his main philosophical work. Some of his translations of Aristotle are now regarded as spurious.

Bogdanov (Malinovsky), Alexander Alexandrovich (1873–1928)

Russian philosopher and economist, publicist, Social-Democrat. A doctor by training, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903. During the years of reaction following the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905-07, he became one of the leaders of the otzovists, who were against the Party's making use of illegal forms of struggle. He helped to organise an anti-Party school on the Island of Capri and in 1909 was expelled from the Bolshevik Party. In 1926, he became director of the Institute of Blood Transfusion and died while carrying out an experiment on himself.

Describing Bogdanov's philosophical views in 1908, Lenin noted four stages in his "philosophical wanderings". To start with, Bogdanov was a "natural-historical" materialist (Osnovniye elementy istoricheskogo vzglyada na prirodu [Fundamental Elements of the Historical Outlook on Nature], 1899). Shortly before the turn of the century he took up a doctrine known as energism (see his book Poznaniye s istoricheskoi tochki zreniya [Knowledge from the Historical Point of View], 1901). Then he supported the philosophy of Mach. Finally, his efforts to overcome the contradictions of Machism and create a "kind of objective idealism" brought him to empirio-monism (Empirio-Monism, 1904-06).

Later he attempted to formulate what he called a "tectology", a universal organisational science, the aim of which was to unite all the sciences and describe the forms and types of any organisation, since he considered that the whole world consisted of various forms of organisation of experience. The idealist foundation of "tectology", its abstract and unhistorical approach, made it completely useless for analysing reality. Bogdanov opposed to Marxist dialectics the theory of equilibrium.

Criticisms of his views are to be found in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and also in the works of Plekhanov. Main works: Kratky kurs ekonomicheskoi nauki (A Short Course of Economic Science), 1897; Filosofiya zhivogo opyta (The Philosophy of Living Experience), 1913; Vseobshchaya organizatsionnaya nauka (tektologiya) (The Universal Organisational Science [Tectology]), 1913-17; O proletarskoi kulture, 1904-24 (On Proletarian Culture, 1904-24), 1924, etc.

Bohme, Jakob (1575–1624)

German pantheist philosopher, whose work retained many elements of theology. A self-educated thinker, he created no consistent and uniform system, expressing his dialectical surmises on the contradictory nature of things and the world as a whole in a language of poetic images and symbols borrowed from Christianity, astrology, alchemy, and cabala. In his works we find both simple paraphrases of Biblical myths inspired by the power of his religious imagination and some profound philosophic observations.

God and nature, according to Bohme, are one; nothing exists outside nature. Everything contains contradictions, both good and evil being present even in God. Bohme saw this dualism as the source of development of the world. His main work Aurora oder die Morgenrote in Aufgange (1612) was condemned as heresy. His ideas influenced the subsequent development of German philosophy (Hamann, Hegel, Schelling, etc.).

Bohr, Niels (1885–1962)

Danish physicist, one of the authors of the quantum theory, Nobel Prize winner. Elected member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1929. After graduating at Copenhagen University, he worked in Rutherford's laboratory in Manchester. Bohr's model of the hydrogen atom and his formulation of the correspondence principle date from 1913. He strove to provide an epistemological substantiation of the specific problems of physics.

In order to interpret quantum mechanics he put forward and developed the positivist principle of complementarity, which he regarded as applicable to various fields of knowledge. Overcoming neopositivism in his later years, Bohr tended towards a materialist interpretation of a number of problems of quantum mechanics and the theory of knowledge. Emphasising the growing role of measuring devices as instruments of research, and of mathematical formalism as a means of adequately describing microprocesses, Bohr noted that "... a widening of the conceptual framework affords the appropriate means of ... enlarging the scope of objective description." (Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 1958, p. 70.)

The objective content of his researches confirms that nature develops dialectically, and that it is of great importance to the scientist to have a conscious grasp of the method of materialist dialectics.

Boltzmann, Ludwig (1844–1906)

Austrian physicist, member of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna. His main works deal with the theory of radiation, the kinetic theory of gases, and the statistical interpretation of the second principle of thermodynamics. His famous H theorem (1872) explained, on the basis of molecular-kinetic theory, the fundamental law of irreversible processes, the law of the increase of entropy. His formula established a relation between the probability of the thermodynamic state and its entropy.

In opposition to the idealist concept of the "thermal death" of the Universe (see "Thermal Death", etc.), Boltzmann advanced his hypothesis of fluctuation, according to which the general balanced state of the Universe as a whole is constantly and inevitably upset in certain spheres by gigantic fluctuations, which cause the uneven development of separate worlds. Boltzmann was a convinced materialist and criticised energism and Machism.

Bonaventure, Giovanni di Fidanza (1221–1274)

Scholastic philosopher, general of the Franciscan Order. Opposed the progressive ideas of his time and persecuted Roger Bacon. The predominant tendencies in Bonaventure's scholasticism are the ideas of St. Augustine's Neo-Platonism and mysticism. Bonaventure accepted the ontological proof of the existence of God (see Proof, etc.) and considered the highest stage of cognition to be a supernatural state of ecstatic contemplation in which man is united with God.

In the controversy over universals Bonaventure maintained a position of realism (see Realism, Medieval). He was canonised in 1482, and in 1587 proclaimed a Doctor of the Church.

Boole, George (1815–1864)

English logician and mathematician. From 1849 to the end of his life, professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork. He evolved the first system of mathematical logic known to history, which afterwards became known as the algebra of logic. The idea of the analogy between algebra and logic determined the direction of all his researches in logic, which are contained in his two main works: Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854). He also investigated the theory of probability and mathematical analysis and was interested in the philosophy of Aristotle and Spinoza. His ideas on the algebra of logic were developed and systematised in the works of Peirce, Schroder, and Poretsky.

Border-Line Situation

A category of the ethical teaching of Jaspers. According to Jaspers, Border-Line Situations (fear, suffering, guilt, struggle, dissatisfaction, death, and others) form the "limits" of human spiritual life and practical activity, beyond which "non-being" is to be found. Inasmuch as a Border-Line Situation is fatal and universal, man cannot escape it, and the overcoming of it means the loss of "existence". According to Jaspers, man may make a truly moral decision only when he has realised the fatal nature of a Border-Line Situation.

Born, Max (1882–1970)

German theoretical physicist. Became a professor at Gottingen University in 1921. Emigrated to Britain during the period of nazi rule. At present lives in the Federal Republic of Germany. Member of many academies, including the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (since 1934). Author of a number of important works on the theory of the atom and crystals, he is best known for his important contribution to quantum mechanics, 1925-26.

When it was shown that the movement of elementary particles was due to a wave process and could be calculated by means of wave equation, Born suggested that wave equation determined only the probability of the position of particles at a given moment. Idealist philosophers seized upon this conception of the laws of the motion of elementary particles as a "proof" provided by quantum mechanics of the indeterminism of processes taking place in the microworld. Born himself adhered to this idealist theory but subsequently approached a more general understanding of determinism, which incorporated statistical laws determining the behaviour of elementary particles. He also criticised neo-positivism.

Botev, Khristo (1849–1876)

Bulgarian poet and materialist philosopher. His world outlook embraced both revolutionary democracy and utopian socialism. He was considerably influenced by Herzen and Chernyshevsky, whose ideas he advocated in Bulgaria. Leader of the peasant revolution in Bulgaria and an ardent patriot, Botev thought it would be possible to set up a socialist system in his country as soon as it was liberated from the Turkish feudal lords and the exploiters among his own countrymen. He held that the peasant commune possessed "socialist principles".

Under the influence of the first volume of Marx's Capital and the working-class movement in the West, Botev came to the conclusion towards the end of his life that the proletariat would be the builder of socialism, but he was mistaken in regarding the poor in general as the proletariat. Philosophically, Botev was a materialist and he developed certain elements of dialectics; he was also an atheist. His understanding of social phenomena, however, was idealist and he regarded the historical process as a result of the perfection of reason in the people's struggle for liberation.

Aesthetically, he followed Chernyshevsky, and in his poetry, which played an important part in the revolutionary movement, realism and revolutionary romanticism are organically merged.

Brain

The central part of the nervous system. The uppermost sections of the cerebrum are directly connected with the psychic life of animals and man. The large hemispheres of man's brain are the organ of speech and abstract vocal thought. The brain came into being at such a level of animal life when additional adaptive reactions became indispensable for the search of conditions of existence in the complicated changing medium.

The central nervous system and its uppermost sections—the brain—are the organ of control, i.e., the system which coordinates the activity of the various organs and regulates the relationships of the organism with the outside environment through psychical reflection. Throughout the history of philosophy and the sciences about man there was a struggle between the materialist and idealist trends over the problem of the nature of man's psyche, consciousness. However, the progress of biological studies of the structure and the activity of the central nervous system, and the brain in particular, paved the way for the triumph of materialism in the solution of this problem.

The ideas and works of Sechenov and I. Pavlov, which proved the reflectory, i.e., determinative nature of the psychical activity of animals and man, played a tremendous role. In addition to the first signal system, common to both animals and man, a second signal system (see Signal Systems)—speech—was formed in man in connection with abstract vocal thought. In the brain there are special centres of perception (auditory and visual) and of speech. The thoroughly social nature of man found its expression in the building of new, compared with animals, morphological structures, which ensure oral intercourse and vocal thought.

The specific form of existence and the assimilation of the past experiences of humanity is also associated with the elaboration of new brain mechanisms. While the experience of the species in animals is inherited in the form of instincts, in man, on the other hand, the historically-shaped forms of activity are assimilated in the process of the individual's development. Hence, particular human aptitudes, such as the ear for music and for speech, the capacity for abstract thinking, etc., are functions not of morphological brain structures but of neuro-dynamic structures of relative stability.

Man's psychic activity progressed not because of the morphological evolution of the brain, as was the case in the history of the animal world, but because of the fact that its functional potentialities improved steadily. This improvement is due to the development of the forms of human experience, of its storage, transmission, and processing as far as and including the creation of automatic mechanisms lightening mental work and enhancing man's creative possibilities.

Thanks to the wide use of cybernetics, the study of the activities of the brain by the classical methods of the physiology of the higher nervous activity and electrophysiology has been supplemented by the method of models (see Cybernetics, Analogue Simulation). The simulation of the activity of the brain proceeds along two main directions: (1) the simulation of separate aspects of the activity of the brain and (2) the simulation of the formal structure of the ultimate products of psychic activity.

Bray, John Francis (1809–1895)

English utopian socialist, economist, active figure in the working-class movement. A self-educated working man, he held that the motive force of human development lay in man's material needs, and that the root of the working people's troubles was the system of exchange. Value, he taught, could be created only by labour. The productive forces and labour must be socialised. He portrayed the future communist society in a manner close to that of Owen.

The road to such a society lay through industrial workers' cooperatives, the various branches being coordinated by regional and national centres, and through a system of "labour money" and barter markets and banks. These propositions influenced Proudhon and his school. An active figure in the Chartist movement, Bray was well aware of the class contradictions in society and of the fact that only the working-class movement could bring communism into being. He held, however, that the road to communism lay through reform. In his books Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy (1839) and A Voyage from Utopia (1841) he produced a devastating criticism of capitalism, taking Britain and the United States as examples.

Brentano, Franz (1838–1917)

Austrian idealist philosopher. Lectured on philosophy at Würzburg and Vienna. An opponent of Kant's criticism, Brentano produced his own philosophical system of metaphysics permeated with the spirit of theism and Catholic scholasticism. His main interest was in psychology. Taking empirical psychology as his basis, he created an idealist doctrine of the "intentionality" of mental phenomena. According to this doctrine the object exists only in the intention of the subject, i.e., in his emotions.

Brentano's views had a great influence on Husserl and other bourgeois philosophers. He is considered one of the founders of the idealist theory of values in Austrian philosophy. Main works: Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889), and Die vier Phasen der Philosophie (1895).

Bridgman, Percy Williams (1882–1961)

American physicist and philosopher. Graduated at Harvard, where he was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy until 1954. Won Nobel Prize for work on the physics of high pressures (1946). In philosophy Bridgman was the founder and leader of a subjective-idealist trend known as operationism. His philosophical views are expounded in his books The Logic of Modern Physics (1927), The Nature of Physical Theory (1936), and other works.

Broglie, Louis Victor de (1892–1987)

French physicist, professor of Paris University, foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. One of the founders of the modern theory of the motion of microobjects (see Quantum Mechanics). His theoretical research, which established the extremely important law of nature that all microscopic material objects possess both corpuscular and wave properties, constitutes the basis of quantum mechanics.

This law of mathematics is expressed in the form of the Broglie equation, which shows the relation of the corpuscular characteristics of microobjects (energy E, impulse p) to their wave characteristics (particle ν, wave length λ): E \= hν, p \= h/λ, where h is the quantum of action. According to Broglie, every microparticle has its particular wave, the characteristics of which can be defined by the above equations. The Broglie waves are, in fact, the ψ-functions, which it is the basic aim of quantum mechanics to define.

Broglie made a substantial contribution to various branches of modern physics. He studied relativist quantum mechanics, the theory of electrons, the problems of the structure of the nucleus, the theory of the distribution of electromagnetic waves in wave-conductors, etc. He is opposed to positivism and maintains materialist positions in his interpretation of the phenomena of the microcosm.

Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600)

Italian philosopher, opponent of scholasticism and the Roman Catholic Church, fervent advocate of the materialist world outlook, which he conceived in the form of pantheism. After eight years' imprisonment he was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in Rome. His main works were the philosophical dialogues De la causa, principio et uno and De l'infinito, universo et mondi.

His world outlook was formed under the influence of ancient classical philosophy (Neo-Platonism and Pythagoreanism, followed by the materialists Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Epicurus, and Lucretius), the Italian materialist free-thinkers of the Renaissance, and the science of his day, particularly the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. Consistently identifying an infinite deity with nature, Bruno was even more persistent than Nicholas of Cusa, by whom he had been influenced, in maintaining the infinity of nature itself.

Using the discovery of Copernicus, Bruno strove to give concrete shape to the physical and astronomical implications of this philosophical principle and in so doing liberated the Copernican theory from its major defects: the traditional conception of a finite Universe, a closed sphere of motionless stars, and the idea that the Sun was stationary and constituted the absolute centre of the Universe. In the process Bruno deduced that the number of worlds in the Universe is infinite, and that some of them might be inhabited.

He refuted the natural philosophical dualism of scholasticism, asserting the homogeneity of the earth and the celestial regions, all of which, he maintained, consist of earth, water, air, fire, and ether. Under the influence of Neo-Platonism he admitted the existence of a universal soul, which he understood as the principle of life, as a spiritual substance permeating all things and constituting their motive principle. In this Bruno, like most of the ancient materialists, took up the position of hylozoism and held that matter was an active self-moving substance, and man and his consciousness part of nature, which was a single whole. Bruno also developed a number of dialectical propositions: on unity, interdependence, and universal motion in nature, and on the coincidence of contraries both in the infinitely great and the infinitely small.

Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821–1862)

English historian and positivist sociologist, author of the History of Civilisation in England (1857–61). Criticising the theological interpretation of history, Buckle set out to discover the laws of the historical process and show how they had worked in the various countries he took as examples. Following Comte, he considered intellectual progress to be the main factor in historical development and denied the existence of moral progress. As a representative of geographical determinism (see Geographical Environment, Geographical Determinism), Buckle attributed the peculiarities of the historical development of various peoples to the influence of natural factors (landscape, soil, climate, and also the type of food they ate).

Buddhism

A world religion (see Christianity and Islam), which preaches relief from suffering through the abnegation of desire and the achievement of the supreme enlightenment known as nirvana. Buddhism originated in India in the 6th century B.C. In modern times it is widespread in Japan, China, Nepal, Burma, and other countries, where it has about 500 million adherents.

In the period when the primitive-communal system was collapsing and class states were making their appearance, Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism called the Buddha (Enlightened One), expressed the protest of the common people against the Brahman religion with its sacred caste distinctions, intricate rites of worship to the gods and sacrifice. He sought liberation from suffering not in social change or in fighting the forces of nature but in moral perfection, which could be obtained by withdrawing from life (beatific enfranchisement) and submerging oneself in nirvana.

Buddha denied the existence of God the Creator, and also the religion of the Vedas but he accepted their teaching on the cycle of births and deaths (sansara), and on retribution (karma), merely indicating that reincarnations depended not on the caste to which a man belonged nor on sacrifices he performed, but on his good or bad actions.

At first (3rd to 1st centuries B.C.) the Buddha's idea of salvation was founded on the philosophical doctrine that the world and the human personality constitute a stream of elements of matter and consciousness—the dharmas—continually replacing one another. According to this doctrine, the road to salvation lay in suppressing any "agitation" of the dharmas.

In the early centuries A.D., the Buddhist religion assumed a completely different character. Simple reverence for the memory of the teacher was replaced by deification of Buddha, and man's salvation was made dependent on the favour of the deity, which could be sought through repetition of the holy sutras, or scriptures. This new religion became known as Mahayana, as distinct from the traditional trend of Hinayana stemming from Buddha himself.

The philosophy of Buddhism also changed. Unlike the Hinayana philosophers, who had regarded material and psychical dharmas as real, the Mahayana philosophers argued that the dharmas were unreal and the whole world was unreal. The doctrine of the unreality of the dharmas, or of Sunyata (void), was put on a logical basis by Nagarjuna (2nd century A.D.). The treatises of Nagarjuna are remarkable among all the Mahayana sutras for their logic and consistency. His rationalism became the point of departure for Buddhist logic, which was represented by Dignaga and Dharmakirti (500–700 A.D.).

Nagarjuna's teaching on the unreality of conceptual thought and on absolute intuitive knowledge became the basis of the later idealist schools (Madhyamaka, Vijnanavada) of Tantric Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism. Currently the advocates of Buddhism stress its "rationalistic" and "atheistic" character. These new epithets are part of an attempt to propagate a modernised form of Buddhist religion. The Buddhists under the leadership of the World Buddhist Fellowship advocate disarmament and peaceful coexistence.

Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolayevich (1871–1944)

Russian economist and idealist philosopher, ideologist of Vekhism. Emigrated in 1922. Professor of theology at Paris University 1925–44. A supporter of "legal Marxism", he began by criticising Narodism (O rynkakh pri kapitalisticheskom proizvodstve {On Markets under Capitalist Production}, 1897), and later became an avowed defender of capitalism.

His revisionist attempts to "test" Marx with Kant led him into conflict with historical materialism and the Marxist theory of progress (Osnovniye problemy teorii progressa [Basic Problems of the Theory of Progress], 1902). His evolution as a philosopher culminated in his recourse to a philosophy of religious mysticism, in which he attempted to "synthesise" science, philosophy, and religion, making them all ultimately dependent on faith, but avoiding the absurdities of pure religion.

Besides the "absolute" (God) and the "cosmos", he introduced the concept of "Sofia", a "third being", comprising both God and nature. His completely unscientific "system" is expounded in his works Svet nevecherny (Undying Light), 1917, Tikhiye dumy (Quiet Thoughts), 1918, and O bogochelovechestve (On Divine Humanity), Part One, 1933.

Butlerov, Alexander Mikhailovich (1828–1886)

Russian chemist. His works provide the foundation on which rests the whole modern science of the chemical structure of matter and the nature of chemical compounds. The basic idea of his theory of chemical structure (1861) is that the chemical nature of the molecule as a whole is determined by the nature, quantity, and type of connection of the atoms of which it is composed, and their influence and disposition in relation to one another.

While emphasising that the atoms in a molecule behave according to a stable pattern, Butlerov regarded the molecule not as something dead and static but as a kind of dynamic system whose parts are in constant motion. He regarded chemical reactions as one of the manifestations of the motion of matter. This theory played an important role in combating the then current idealist and agnostic views on chemistry. Butlerov showed that the internal structure of molecules can be known and may, therefore, be actively used and changed by man.

His theory of chemical structure has now been further developed owing to the discovery of the complex structure of the atom, and elucidation of the quantum chemical connection between the atoms in a molecule. In his treatment of the fundamental problems of chemistry Butlerov adhered to spontaneous materialism, but when discussing philosophy he expressed idealist views.