A. F. Losev as a Historian of Classical Culture

Over the course of A. F. Losev's many years of scholarly work, he has never paid special attention to the theory of culture as such. His research of many decades has been in the areas of literature, mythology, philosophy, logic, aesthetics, art, and language. Yet all his research is imbued with a single and carefully thought out conception of culture and the typology of cultural history. Briefly put, this conception consists in a view of culture as the historical and practical embodiment of actively pursued spiritual values at a given historical period. Anyone who has read Losev closely can think of works devoted to precisely that integral sphere of the development of the classical world where it is difficult to separate out either the material or the spiritual principles. In Losev's view this does not mean that one cannot study the history of material culture or of spiritual culture by themselves. Indeed, they can and must be given separate attention; and Losev himself has devoted many hundreds of pages ...