Pavel Florensky
Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) was a Russian theologian, priest, mathematician, scientist, inventor, and philosopher.
He wrote on art, language, organic chemistry, mysticism, Kant, sculpture, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Aegean culture, arithmetic, idealism, iconography, electromagnetism, microscopy, carbolic acid, asbestos, Pythagorean numbers, Aleksandr Blok, ecclesiology, and a wide variety of other topics. After the revolution he was one of the few intellectuals with conservative views to be permitted to remain professionally active in the country, at least for a time. His training in science made him useful in the early years of the Soviet Union, when he applied his expertise as an electrical engineer to various public-works projects. In Soviet history, until recently the achievement for which Florensky was perhaps best remembered officially in his own country was his invention in 1927 of a noncoagulating machine oil. [1]
Literature
- By Florensky
- Мнимости в геометрии [Mimosti v geometrii], Moscow: Лазурь, 1991, 96 pp. (in Russian)
- Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, Reaktion Books, 2002. [2]
- More.
- On Florensky
- Steven Cassedy, "Pavel Florensky", Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, University of California Press, 1990, pp 114-120.
- Ross Wolfe, The aesthetics of Russian Orthodox Church architecture: A philosophical, historical, and critical investigation, The Charnel-House blog, 30 August 2010.
- Milan Zust, A la recherche de la vérité vivante, l'expérience religieuse de Pavel A. Florensky (1882-1937). (in French)
