“Our Dialectics Were Not Learned from Hegel”: The Phenomenon of the Hegelian Seminars in the Soviet Philosophy of Science (an Interview)

On the pages of our magazine we have repeatedly addressed the topic of the phenomenon of informal scientific communities in the USSR. Home seminars and “apartment” circles were especially prominent in the philosophical environment, which was not surprising, since philosophy and the philosophy of science, in particular, were most susceptible to the influence of ideologization and, of course, “dialectization”. We will talk about Hegelian seminars – “apartment” circles, which took place in the late 1960s – early 1970s in Moscow. Natalia Ivanovna Kuznetsova, a participant in three Hegelian seminars, Doctor of Philosophy, Chief Researcher of the Department of Science Studies of the IHST RAS, talks about how and why the philosopher who “turned everything on its head” united the young “sixties generation” and how this influenced the development of the philosophy of science in the USSR.