Experimental Philosophy the Concept of Optimism in Educational Psychology

English translation © 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text “Eksperimental’naia filosofiia (E.V. Il’enkov i A.I. Meshcheriakov),” in E.V. Il’enkov: lichnost’ i tvorchestvo, ed. I.P Farman (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1999), pp. 172–96. Evald Vasil’evich Ilyenkov was only two months younger than Aleksandr Ivanovich Meshcheriakov—a doctor of psychological sciences and posthumous winner (with his teacher Ivan Afanas’evich Sokolianskii) of the USSR State Prize in 1980 for their work to set up a system for training and educating deaf and blind children. Ilyenkov outlived Meshcheriakov by less than four and a half years. These men were the closest of friends. Ilyenkov not only followed Meshcheriakov’s work but participated in it in an extremely active way. After the latter died, Ilyenkov directed and completed the training of four of Mescheriakov’s deaf and blind students in the department of psychology of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The author of this article was one of these students. The article that follows analyzes precisely what aspect of science brought Ilyenkov and Meshcheriakov together, although they worked in such seemingly different fields that have nothing in common. At the end of this article an attempt is made to define the prospects for the practice of educational psychology, if at some future time it were to be based on Ilyenkov’s ideas of spiritual health and harmonious personal development.