Frank, Semyon Lyudvigovich
FRANK, SEMYON LYUDVIGOVICH
FRANK, SEMYON LYUDVIGOVICH (1877–1950), Russian philosopher. Frank was born in Moscow. He became an enthusiastic Marxist in P.B. Struve's group, but later rejected Marx and in 1912 joined the Orthodox Church. He lectured at St. Petersburg from 1912 to 1917, was professor at Saratov (1917–21), and was then appointed to Moscow University working with Berdyaev. The Soviets banished him in 1922 and he went to Germany. In 1937 he had to flee, spending eight years in France, before moving to England. A leading philosophical theologian, he contended that the world must be conceived as a "total-unity." He tried to give Christianity cosmic significance and to develop a religious humanism, seeing the glory of God in human creativity. His chief work, Predmet Znaniya ("The Object of Knowledge," 1915), appeared in French in 1937 as La connaissance et l'être. Two later works, Nepostizhimoye (1939; God With Us, 1946) and Realnost i chelovek (1956; Reality and Man, 1965), have appeared in English.
bibliography:
P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3 (1967), 219f.; N.O. Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy (1952), 266–92; V.V. Zenkousky, History of Russian Philosophy (1953), 852–72.
[Richard H. Popkin]