Lubkin, Aleksandr Stepanovich

Born in 1770 or 1771; died Aug. 30 (Sept. 11), 1815, in Kazan. Russian deist philosopher. Graduated from the Kostroma and St. Petersburg Central (1792) theological seminaries.

Lubkin taught philosophy at the Kostroma (from 1797) and St. Petersburg army (1801-06) seminaries. He was a professor in the department of speculative and practical philosophy at the University of Kazan (1812-15). In his Letters on Critical Philosophy (1805), he was the first in Russian scholarly literature to examine and criticize the philosophy of I. Kant from the standpoint of sensationalism. In that work, as well as in the book An Outline of Logic (1807) and the commentaries to W. Snell’s book Basic Course of Philosophy (translation and notes by Lubkin and P. Kondyrev, parts 1-5, 1813-14), he developed his deist and sensationalist views. He expressed a number of original ideas in logic. Toward the end of his life, religious currents became stronger in his views. Elements of freethinking in his last work, An Outline of Metaphysics, caused its printing to be prohibited.

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