George Kline

George Louis Kline (March 3, 1921 – October 21, 2014) was a philosopher, translator (esp. of Russian philosophy and poetry), and prominent American specialist in Russian and Soviet philosophy, author of more than 300 publications, including two monographs, six edited or co-edited anthologies, more than 165 published articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, over 55 translations, and 75 reviews.

The majority of his works are in English, but translations of some of them have appeared in Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Korean and Japanese.

He is particularly noted for his authoritative studies on Spinoza, Hegel, and Whitehead.

He attended Boston University for three years (1938–41), but his education was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Air Corps during WW II, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war he completed his undergraduate education with honors at Columbia College, Columbia University (1947), followed by graduate degrees at Columbia University (M.A. 1948; Ph.D. 1950).

The entire field of Russian philosophy as an object of study in America has been shaped to a remarkable degree by the efforts of Kline himself over the course of a long career, beginning with his first publications in 1949: "Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and the Soviet Regime," Occidental (NY), no. 2, and "A Note on Soviet Logic," Journal of Philosophy, v. 46, p. 228.

The textual precision, historical learning, and depth of insight found in Kline's own numerous studies of Russian and Soviet philosophy over several decades have served as a model of serious scholarship on these topics for many other researchers.

He is also responsible for making available in English some of the most important reference works in the field, including the English translation of Zenkovsky's History of Russian Philosophy, and (with others) Russian Philosophy, a 3-vol.

In 1949-50 Kline was in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar, just as V. V. Zenkovsky's История русской философии (2 vols., 1948 and 1950) was being published there.

While in Paris Kline met Zenkovsky and volunteered to translate the History into English, completing it after returning to the U.S. During this process Zenkovsky introduced revisions and corrections for incorporation into the English translation, so that Kline's translation became the authoritative version of the text.

This work became the standard history of Russian philosophy for the next half-century, a crucial reference source for all scholars of Russian philosophy.

He taught philosophy at Columbia University 1950–52 and 1953–59 and was Visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago, 1952–53.

For example, during the 1950s Kline reviewed approximately thirty recent Soviet publications in the fields of formal logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mathematics, principally for the Journal of Symbolic Logic, as the field of formal logic was opening up in the U.S.S.R. He has also published several authoritative bibliographies of works in Russian, and also in other languages, concerning the history of Russian thought and culture, as well as a bibliography of Brodsky's published writings.

Finally, Kline's skills as an editor are legendary.

He contributed his services to a great many publishing ventures connected with Russian and Soviet philosophy, including the Sovietica series of monographs and the journal Studies in Soviet Thought.

On a personal level, he most generously assisted in the editing of other scholars' drafts of works in philosophy, intellectual history, literature and literary criticism, and has been a constant source of encouragement and support for younger scholars.

In all of these ways Kline has placed his own irreplaceable mark upon the entire field.

Beginning in 1952, at the University of Chicago, Kline first taught his famous course on "Russian Ethical and Social Theory"; it was subsequently taught at Columbia University through the 1950s, at Bryn Mawr College from 1960, and at a number of other institutions over the years.

He also taught, more or less continuously, courses on the history of Russian philosophy, Russian and Soviet Marxism, and a number of courses on Russian literature.

He moved to Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) in 1959, initially teaching in both the philosophy and the Russian departments.

The appearance of these three volumes in the 1960s made it feasible for the first time for instructors in the U.S. and U.K. to teach university courses based upon a representative sampling of the entire history of Russian philosophy, with excellent translations and scholarly introductions for each general section and each philosopher.

Kline contributed ten translations to these three volumes, revised a number of others, and advised the editors on which selections should be included.

They commented that "Without his help and inspiration the publication of this historical anthology of Russian philosophy could have been neither successfully planned nor achieved."

Kline's own many studies of Russian and Soviet philosophy can be distributed into five main categories:

He was appointed full Professor of Philosophy in 1961, becoming Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy from 1981 until his retirement in 1991.

anthology of original translations of Russian philosophical texts, continuously in print from 1965 to the present.

Kline has also supplied a large number of entries on Russian philosophers for a variety of philosophical encyclopedias over many years.

He has written approximately 75 reviews of other scholars' works on Russian and Soviet philosophy as well as of new Soviet philosophical works.

In addition to Kline's translation of Zenkovsky, another exceptionally important resource for English-speaking students of Russian philosophy has been the comprehensive three-volume collection of original translations of Russian philosophers from the 18th century (Skovoroda) up through early Soviet Marxism (Russian Philosophy, Ed. James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan and Mary-Barbara Zeldin with the Collaboration of George L. Kline, New York: Quadrangle Press, 1965; revised paperback ed. in 1969; reprinted by the University of Tennessee Press in 1976, 1984).

The first category is well represented by Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Pr., 1968), based upon the six Weil Institute Lectures that Kline delivered in Cincinnati in 1964, examining a panorama of attitudes toward religion by ten Russian thinkers, treated in five pairs: Bakunin and Tolstoy (two versions of anarchism, anti-religious and religious), Konstantin Leontiev and Vasily Rozanov (religious neo-conservativisms), Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev (religious existential-isms), Maxim Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky (pseudo-religious "God-Building"), V. I. Lenin and Sergei M. Plekhanov (militant vs. moderate atheism).

Against the background of this extreme range of attitudes toward religion by various Russian thinkers, Kline concluded by examining three dominant attitudes toward religion in the then contemporary Soviet Union.

They were:

Kline has published a number of important articles on aspects of religious belief in Russia, including "Religious Ferment Among Soviet Intellectuals," in Religion and the Soviet State: A Dilemma of Power ed.

M. Hayward and W. C. Fletcher (New York: Praeger, 1969), and especially "Spor o religioznoi filosofii: L. Shestov protiv Vl. Solov'eva," Russkaia reigiozno-filosofskaia mysl; XX veka, ed.

N. P. Poltoratzky (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1975) and "Russian Religious Thought" in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, ed.

He was President of the Hegel Society of America (1984–86), and President of the Metaphysical Society of America (1985–86).

He has also made notable contributions to the study of Marx and the Marxist tradition.

Ninian Smart, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985).

Afterwards, Kline served as a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, South Carolina (1992–93).

He also taught one-semester courses at Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College and Swarthmore College.