ABSTRACT
Academy in Exile Fellow, The Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, Germany. The research was supported by a grant of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research 20-011-00885 А ‘Gender revision of the history of philosophy’ in 2021. I would like to thank Zinaida Kuzicheva, Valentin Bazhanov, and Slava Gerovich for sharing their insights, as well as the editors of this volume, Vesa Oittinen and Elina Viljanen, for their helpful comments.
Sofya Yanovskaya (1896–1966), Professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University, was a key figure in the development of the philosophy of mathematics and logic in the USSR at a time when the Leninist–Stalinist ideology was widespread. Stalin endeavoured to control all the fields of intellectual thought at the beginning of 1930s, and suppressed the study of theoretical research, favouring applied study instead. Educated as a ‘Red Professor’, Yanovskaya began by criticising idealistic or bourgeois assumptions at work in the philosophy of mathematics. However, Yanovskaya quickly reversed her strategy and began developing mathematical logic. She published Russian translations of works by Hilbert and Ackermann, Tarski, Polyá, Carnap, and Turing, and helped with the publication of works by Kleene and Church. The later period of her life was dedicated to the defence of mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics from bashing by those in favour of dialectical materialism. She used various Soviet intellectual strategies in order to defend the idea of abstract objects and other conceptions of mathematical Platonism. She discussed the theories of Russell, Carnap, and Gödel. This chapter argues that Yanovskaya offered a basis for a non-Marxist philosophy of mathematics during the Stalin era and that she developed a critical philosophy of mathematics during the post-Stalin years.
