Gustav Gustavovich Shpet (Russian: Густа́в Густа́вович Шпет; April 7::1879, Kiev, Russian Empire (present-day Kyiv, Ukraine) – November 16, 1937, Tomsk, Russian SFSR) was a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, psychologist, art theoretician, and interpreter (he knew 17 languages) of German-Polish descent. He was a student of a well-known Russian psychologist and philosopher George Chelpanov, a follower of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, who introduced Husserlian phenomenology to Russia, modifying the phenomenology which he found in Husserl. Shpet was a Vice president of the Russian State Academy of Arts in Moscow (1923—1929). Shpet is an author of many books, including his famous A View on the History of Russian philosophy (Russian: Очерк развития русской философии; in 2 vols.) and The Hermeneutics and its problems (Russian: Герменевтика и её проблемы).

Contents

• 1 Biography
• 2 Death
• 3 References
• 4 Further reading
• 5 External links

Biography

Shpet was born as the illegitimate son of an Austro-Hungarian officer and a mother of Polish-German decent of an aristocratic background.

Shpet enrolled in St. Vladimir University of Kiev in 1898, but was expelled for joining a Marxist circle. He never adopted a Marxist philosophical viewpoint, even though he sympathised with the socio-economic aims of Marxism.

As a thinker, he was thoroughly grounded in Russian religious thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His philosophy combined Husserl's *ysis of the structure of consciousness with Platonism of Orthodoxy, the doctrine of incarnation, and veneration of matter.

In 1921 he founded the Ins*ute of Scientific Philosophy in Moscow.

His espousal of Husserl's phenomenology influenced the literary scholars Mikhail Petrovsky, Grigoriy Vinokur, and Mikhail Stoliarov.

Death

Shpet was a victim of the Great Purge. He was originally arrested on 14 March 1935, along with several other former colleagues from the State Academy. He was charged with anti-soviet activities, received a sentence of five years internal exile, and was sent to Tomsk, the first university city in Siberia. Here Shpet worked on a new Russian translation of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. However, he was arrested again on 27 October 1937 and charged with belonging to a monarchist organisation. He was executed on 16 November 1937.

References

Further reading

• Bourgeot, Liisa (2021). Gustav Shpet’s Theory of the Inner Form of the Word: A Phenomenological Study (Ph.D. thesis). Slavica Helsingiensia, 55. The University of Helsinki. ISBN:978-951-51-7710-0. ISSN:0780-3281.

External links

• At the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy