Popovych, Myroslav

Popovych, Myroslav [Попович, Мирослав; Popovyč], b 12 April 1930 in Zhytomyr, d 10 February 2018 in Kyiv. Philosopher. A graduate of Kyiv University, he was a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1963, a doctor from 1967, and chairman of the institute’s Department for the Logic of Scientific Knowledge from 1969. In December 1986 he was elected president of the Ukrainian Branch of the USSR Philosophical Society. Between 2001 and 2018 he was director of the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Popovych wrote books in Russian on the philosophical analysis of scientific language (1966), in which he reviewed the development of syntactic and semantic methods of analysis in order to clarify the relation of theory to reality; on the philosophical questions of semantics (1975); and on the development of logical ideas in a cultural-historical context (1979). He also edited several books on the logic of scientific methodology and research. He cultivated an interest in the general history of ideas and published articles on writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol and a book on the worldview of the ancient Slavs (1985). In Ukrainian he published a defense of Marxist materialism (1964), a biographical novel about Hryhorii Skovoroda (with Ivan Drach and Serhii Krymsky, 1984), a novel with an essay about Gogol (1989), a book on the history of Ukrainian culture (Narys istoriï kul'tury Ukraïny, 1998), Buty liudynoiu (To Be a Human Being, 2011), and Filosofiia svobody (The Philosophy of Freedom, 2018). After 1989 he was active in the leading organs of the Popular Movement of Ukraine (Rukh).

[This article was updated in 2020.]