Immanuel Kant, in the work of the Soviet philosopher and psychologist Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein

The article considers Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein’s views on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In 1914, Rubinstein completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Marburg, Germany, in a school of Neo-Kantianism led by Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. In the Soviet Union, under the domination of Marxist-Leninist ideology, Kantian philosophy, although criticised, was not banned as it was classified as part of German classical philosophy, regarded as the forerunner of Marxism. In Rubinstein’s long career, one may thus observe various periods of analysis and evaluations of Kant’s critical idealism, which aimed to demonstrate the fallacy of a purely subjective-idealist approach to cognition. Rubinstein’s objective was to achieve a unified ontological and epistemological concept. They should not be subordinated to one another, as in materialism (consciousness is a derivative of being-matter) or idealism (being is a construct of consciousness). For Rubinstein, the phenomenon of activity provides such a connecting phenomenon of being and cognition (consciousness) into a single whole, which not only leaves them relatively independent and not an instrument for reducing one to the other, but, on the contrary, through a correlation relationship, activity becomes a means of transforming and improving them both. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.