Ostrianyn, Danylo

Ostrianyn, Danylo [Острянин, Данило; Ostrjanyn], b 30 December 1906 in Bilsk near Zinkiv, Poltava gubernia, d 17 May 1988 in Kyiv. Philosopher; corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1957. After graduating from the Ukrainian Institute of Communist Education in Kharkiv (1929) he lectured on Marxism-Leninism at postsecondary schools in Kharkiv. In 1952 he moved to Kyiv to direct the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (to 1962); he chaired its Department of the History of Ukrainian Philosophical and Sociological Thought (1955–63) and the departments of philosophy (1963–69) and the history of philosophy (1969–75) at Kyiv University. He wrote numerous works in the history of philosophy in Ukraine, the history of science, and the philosophy of science; edited over 60 monographs and collections of essays; and produced books in Ukrainian on religion and its ‘reactionary role’ (1955), Mykhailo Maksymovych’s worldview (1960), and materialist philosophy in Ukraine (1971), and books in Russian on Illia Mechnikov (2 vols, 1953) and materialism and dialectics in Russian imperial natural science in the 18th and 19th centuries (1984). He oversimplified the development of philosophy as a struggle between idealism and materialism and exaggerated the materialistic elements in the thought of many thinkers. A biobibliography appeared in 1987.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]