Pamfil Danilovich Iurkevich

Born Feb. 16 (28), 1826, in the village of Lipliavoe, Poltava Province; died Oct. 4 (16), 1874, in Moscow. Russian idealist philosopher and teacher.

In 1851, Iurkevich began teaching philosophy at the Kiev Theological Academy. Starting in 1861, he was a professor at the University of Moscow, where V. S. Solov’ev attended his lectures. From 1869 to 1873, Iurkevich was dean of the university’s faculty of history and philology.

Iurkevich developed an original version of Christian Platonism; he viewed ideas as the objective and real essence of things, their rational basis, and the “norm” and “law” of their existence. Recognizing the importance of experience and observation, he maintained that ideas must be discovered and interpreted through the phenomena made available by reality. Iurkevich’s anthropology is based on the biblical teaching according to which the “heart” is the focus of man’s entire spiritual life—a function that Iurkevich considers a precondition of true knowledge.

Iurkevich’s idealist critique of N. G. Chernyshevskii’s “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy” gave rise to stormy disputes among various authors (including Chernyshevskii and M. A. Antonovich) that had broad social repercussions. G. V. Plekhanov criticized Iurkevich from the Marxist point of view. The themes treated by Iurkevich determined to a great extent the questions that subsequently became the subject matter of philosophical idealism in Russia (as exemplified by V. S. Solov’ev and P. A. Florenskii and partly by G. G. Shpet).