Teodor Oizerman

Teodor Ilyich Oizerman (1914-2017) was a Soviet and Russian philosopher and academician, and one of the most prolific historians of philosophy of his country. His work belongs to the Soviet Marxist tradition, although over time he distanced himself from some of its canonical formulations. He matters chiefly for his attempt to explain the history of thought as a process with its own internal logic.

He was born in Petrovirivka into a Jewish family of teachers. During the Second World War he served in the Red Army. His scholarship focused on German classical philosophy, from Kant and Fichte to Hegel, and on the origins of Marxism, subjects treated in monographs such as Making of the Marxist Philosophy. He joined the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1981 and received the USSR State Prize in 1983.

Later he proposed that the history of philosophy is not merely an archive of doctrines but a process to be understood from its own structures, an idea he developed in his theory of the historical process in philosophy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he moved toward social democratic positions and rejected Lenin's reading of Marx and Engels, which he judged a departure that led toward oligarchy rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat.

His influence is felt above all in Russian historiography of philosophy, through pupils such as Merab Mamardashvili and Evald Ilyenkov. He died in Moscow in 2017, aged 102.