Seminar "German and Russian Neo-Kantianism"
15 February at 6.45 PM (Moscow time)
Participants: professors, graduate students, masters and students of RUDN University, Higher School of Economics, Russian State University for the Humanities, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Saratov State University. N.G. Chernyshevsky, University of Klagenfurt (Austria).
Briefly about the most interesting and impressive biographical facts, sometimes similar: almost at the same time these people: Sesemann (1884-1963), Rubinstein (1889-1960), both studied in Marburg with Cohen, Natorp and Cassirer, the first in 1910/12, the second 1910/14 Rubinstein defended his doctorate from Cohen in 1913, Sesemann was a member of the anniversary collection on the occasion of Cohen’s 70th birthday in 1912, which was compiled and edited by Natorp. During World War II, Sesemann helped Jews at risk to their lives in Vilnius, for which his family received a commemorative medal from the Israeli government after his death.
After the war, already at an advanced age, both were repressed by the Stalinist regime. Seseman suffered more, who spent 6 years in the Siberian camp Taishet, not far from Irkutsk (1950/56), while Rubinstein was accused of cosmopolitanism, hounded, removed from all positions, fired from the university, also did not publish from 1947 to 1953.
Everyone had their own lifestyle that helped them survive: Sesemann went in for sports, and even from a camp in Siberia, where he had to cut down a forest as an almost seventy-year-old scientist, he wrote to his wife and children that working in the air was good for his health. Rubinstein, in difficult cases, believed that one could retreat, but not yield. This is how he assessed his transition from philosophy to psychology in the 1920s, when in Soviet Russia philosophy became the servant of ideology, but he managed to develop the theory of creative amateur activity, the theory of personality, when in Stalin’s time a person was considered by the dominant ideology as a cog in the state mechanism.