The Mechanist L.M. Rubanovskii, Specialist in the History and Philosophy of Science

The article reconstructs the life and professional journey of an active participant in Soviet
discussions in the field of the history and philosophy of natural science in the 1920s and
1930s, Lazar Mikhailovich Rubanovskii. A graduate from the Division of Theoretical Natural
Science of the Institute of Red Professors, Rubanovskii was a proponent of the mechanist
school of thought his views evolved. He worked at Moscow University, at the Institute of
Chemical Physics, and headed the methodology sector at the Leningrad Physico-Technical
Institute. He committed suicide in the atmosphere of persecution and repressions. Of most
interest today are his attempt to construct a general outline of the history of chemistry with
an emphasis on the significance of the phlogiston period, a historico-scientific study of the
development of the statistical method in physics, and a scientific and philosophical reconstruction of the evolution of views on the second law of thermodynamics.