Preface to the Publication of A.F. Losev’s Unknown Text “The Subject of Psychology”

The paper presents a passage from the second, recently revealed part of A.F. Losev’s book “Philosophy of Name” devoted to the psychology of thinking. According to Losev’s initial plan, the first part of the book was to be the “General and phenomenological analysis of thought and word, or name” which eventually became the published book “Philosophy of Name”. In the second, unpublished part the author planned to interpret “On the dialectic nature of name”. A fragment of hand-written text that was found in A.F. Losev’s archive most probably belongs to this second part. Here, the author creates the phenomenological and dialectic model of the subject of perception and logically constructs its main characteristics and manifestations: stimulation, sensation, representation, self-reflection (intelligentsia). While describing and analyzing the “stage” of sensation, Losev focuses on the “subject of psychology”, all presented in this very paper. The author argues for the “phenomenological formula of mind”. The philosophical method used by A.F. Losev reminds one of E. Husserl’s descriptive (eidetic) phenomenology of the “Logical Investigations” period.

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