Merab Mamardashvili was born September 15, 1930, in Gori, Gerorgia and died November 25, 1990, in Moscow. He was a philosopher most of whose creative life passed in Moscow and Tbilisi, Georgia, in the period from the 1950s through the 1980s. He was an original thinker who received world recognition. His main spheres of inquiry were the philosophy of consciousness, the theory of transformed forms of consciousness; classical and non-classical forms of rationality; the phenomenology of life, love, and death; proof of the necessity of Cartesian, Kantian, and Husserlian themes as "elements" or dimensions of all philosophizing; problems of the existence, consciousness, and action of man under the conditions of socialism and of the Soviet regime; contemporary civilization and the "anthropological catastrophe."

Mamardashvili graduated from the philosophy department of Moscow University in 1954 and completed his graduate studies there in 1957. He was on the editorial staff of...