Pawel Vasilievich Kopnin

Pavel Vasilyevich Kopnin (; 27 January 1922 – 27 June 1971) was a Soviet philosopher, epistemologist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.

Biography Born in to the family of a railroad worker, Kopnin studied and the Faculty of Philosophy of the Moscow State University. He was enlisted in the Red Army during the Second World War and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1943.

After the war, he entered and then graduated at the Moscow State Pedagogical University in 1947 with a PhD.

He worked at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU. From 1947 to 1955, he served as an associate professor, head of the department of Tomsk University.

From 1958, he worked in Ukraine. Kopnin headed the Department of Philosophy at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, and then the Department of Dialectical and Historical Materialism at Kyiv State University from 1959 to 1961.

From 1962 to 1968, he was the director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and since 1968 he was the director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He taught as a professor at the Department of Dialectical Materialism at the Philosophical Faculty of Moscow State University.

Kopnin was member of the editorial boards of the Philosophical Encyclopedia (1961–1970) and the journal Voprosy filosofii (1963–1971). From 1963, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies.

Pavel Kopnin died on 27 June 1971, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.