Nicholas Lossky

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Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky (Russian: Никола́й Ону́фриевич Ло́сский; December 6 [O.S. November 24] 1870 – January 24, 1965) was a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher who represented aspects of neo-idealism and metaphysical libertarianism of the Silver Age of Russian pre-Revolutionary and emigré philosophy, in what he termed his own philosophy of intuitive-personalism.

Born in Latvia to an Orthodox Christian father and a Catholic mother, he was expelled from school for promoting atheism. But shortly after the Russian Revolution, in 1918, after escaping from an elevator accident, he became Orthodox under the guidance of his friend and fellow philosopher Fr. Pavel Florensky.

Forced out of his university teaching position in St. Petersburg due to his Christian faith, he emigrated to Czechoslovakia at the invitation of Tomáš Masaryk, and as a professor at the Russian University of Prague in Bratislava became part of a vibrant network of ex-Marxist Russian Orthodox emigré intellectuals in Europe between the wars. After World War II he joined the faculty of St. Vladimir's Seminary, then in New York City, in America, and later moved to Paris where he died.

Drawing on German philosophical discourse in which he became engaged while working on his doctorate in Germany before World War I, he sought to articulate Orthodox Christian traditions of personhood, epistemology, and cosmology in the discourses of modern Western philosophy. His classic book History of Russian Philosophy provides an intellectual history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian philosophy through the 1950s. It includes a valuable brief but in-depth survey of the philosophical works of Fr. Florensky and Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, examining in particular how the latter's sophic philosophy both drew on Orthodox traditions and came in part to obscure their ontological perspective. The book also contrasts Russian Soviet dialectical materialism with other traditions of Russian philosophy rooted in Christianity.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Lossky