In his two-volume magnum opus
Polozhitel'nye zadachi filosofii (
The Positive Tasks of Philosophy),
L. Lopatin (1855-1920), who taught at Moscow University, defended the
possibility of metaphysical knowledge. He claimed that empirical
knowledge is limited to appearances, whereas metaphysics yields
knowledge of the true nature of things. Although Lopatin saw Hegel and
Spinoza as the definitive expositors of rationalistic idealism, he
rejected both for their very transformation of concrete relations into
rational or logical ones. Nevertheless, Lopatin affirmed the role of
reason particularly in philosophy in conscious opposition to, as he saw
it, Solovyov's ultimate surrender to religion. In the first volume, he
attacked materialism as itself a metaphysical doctrine that elevates
matter to the status of an absolute that cannot explain the particular
properties of individual things or the relation between things and
consciousness. In his second volume, Lopatin distinguishes mechanical
causality from "creative causality," according to which one phenomenon
follows another, though with something new added to it. Despite his
wealth of metaphysical speculation, quite foreign to most contemporary
readers, Lopatin's observations on the self or ego derived from
speculation that is not without some interest. Denying that the self has
a purely empirical nature, Lopatin emphasized that the undeniable
reality of time demonstrated the non-temporality of the self, for
temporality could only be understood by that which is outside time.
Since the self is extra-temporal, it cannot be destroyed, for that is an
event in time. Likewise, in opposition to Solovyov, Lopatin held that
the substantiality of the self is immediately evident in consciousness.
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