Bonifaty Kedrov

Bonifatij Kedrov Mikhailovich (Russian Бонифатий Михайлович Кедров; * 27 Novemberjul / December 10 1903greg in Yaroslavl, .. † September 10, 1985 in Moscow) was a Russian philosopher and historian of science. His studies on the history of chemistry received worldwide acclaim and have been translated into numerous languages.

Life

From 1935 he was a scientific advisor to the Central Committee of the CPSU. In 1938 Kedrov experimented on the viscosity of rubber solutions together with a study about it. This led him from 1938 as a chemist in his hometown Jaroslaw into the local tire factory, which was important for the defense during the Second World War later, where he actively participated only until 1941 and was postponed due to injury and a lung disease.

From 1945 he was deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1946 he defended his doctoral thesis in philosophy entitled The Daltons atomic theory and its philosophical significance. In the years 1946-1958 Kedrov worked as a professor of dialectical and historical materialism at the Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Moscow State University. He was from 1947 the journal Philosophy out. From 1962 to 1974 he was director of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology of MSU. 1960 to 1970 he was involved as an editor at the Soviet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Kedrov died after a long illness on 10 September 1985 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

In 1960 he became a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Kedrov was also a member of many foreign academies and scientific societies, such as the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (both appointed in 1972 ).

Work

While general Marxist philosophical studies of science and its classification, it dealt with the history of chemistry in particular at Dalton and Josiah Willard Gibbs, and especially the Gibbs paradox on the entropy of mixed gases with which even Max Planck, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Van der Waals, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein addressed. Kedrov himself went philosophical approach to the problem.

Since 1930, Kedrov sat apart with the Dialectics of Nature by Engels. His collected writings were published to 1973.

Writings

• Three aspects of the atoms (1969). The first part of the trilogy beschäftiogt with the " Gibbs Paradox". Herein Kedrov tries to solve the paradox he showed the possibility of revocation rule to the "phases" Gibbs and put it into a general law on the variability of thermodynamic systems.
• The second part of the trilogy deals with the teachings of The Daltons. This historical perspective includes not only the separate article about Dalton's atomic theory and the diploma and doctoral theses Kedrovs, but also approaches the then current research and its predecessors: Lomonosov and Lavoisier.
• Finally, the third part of the trilogy is an exploration of Mendeleev among logical and historical aspects. The volume includes analyzes, especially on the way to the creation of the periodic table of the elements.

• I. Investigations of pre-Marxist conceptions of the problem of classification science from antiquity to the angel.
• II: History of the problems of the classification of the sciences since the middle of the previous century. Publisher: Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975.
• In German classification of Sciences ( Akademie-Verlag ) 1976