Conclusion
pp. 166-171
in: , S. L. Rubinštejn and the philosophical foundations of Soviet psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1968Abstract
The purpose of this work has been to examine critically the philosophical foundations on which the edifice of Soviet psychological theory has been built. In Chapter I we investigated the sources of this theory; these were seen to be two in number: the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism and the scientific theory of the great Russian physiological psychologists, particularly of I. P. Pavlov. Certainly, Pavlov's theories can scarcely be called philosophical; but as we have tried to show, the insistence on his ideas seems to have been primarily motivated by philosophical considerations; that is to say, it has been considered as a means to the construction of psychological science on the basis of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. To this end Pavlov's teaching on higher nervous activity is supposed to provide a scientific elucidation of the general Marxist-Leninist thesis that psychic phenomena are a function of the brain.