Zaid Orudzhev

The naturalistic conception of humans, which has so far been unable to make the strictly logical shift from animals to humans themselves, and which sometimes argues that the problem lies in the absence of a "missing link" that is yet to be found, is mistaken. In fact, there is a "decisive link", which this conception does not in any way seek. This conception does not take account of the presence of the human capacity for a priori thought, the presence of which was proved by German classical philosophy in the person of Kant, who proceeded from the premise that it is humans that can think a priori, because they possess mind. Kant had no knowledge of Darwin's ideas and therefore did not deal with the problem of animal, a posteriori thought transforming into actual human, a priori thought. Plato raised the issue of apriorism with his concept of "anamnesis", and so, later on, did Leibniz, with his concept of "innate ideas". But Darwin himself, as a 19th-century Englishman, took the sensualist view, seeing sensation in absolute terms and viewing the capacity for abstraction as something of which for human mind was sufficient.

During the next few years, Orudzhev was a senior research fellow and then chief research fellow at the Russian President's Academy of State Service. Since 2005, he is a professor at the Moscow State Academy for Business Administration.

From these points, Orudzhev draws out the internal meaning of history, which boils down to the gradual "exclusion" from human nature of what has been inherited from the first (primitive) stage of the temporal existence of human beings – principally, the chief animal instinct – the instinct of strength and weakness. "Displacement" occurs in four major stages (historical epochs, each of which is an integrative experience of it) that correspond to the four levels of civilization, based on: (i) written law (antiquity), (ii) common human ethics (Middle Ages), (iii) bourgeois equality and money as a universal measure of human activity (the modern age), and (iv) finally, the nascent information age, based increasingly on human beings' individual creative freedom (for further detail on the corresponding modes of human thought that define historical periods, see the two aforementioned books published in 2004 and 2009). As can be seen, the levels of civilisation coincide in time with the historical epochs. During the third stage of temporal being (at the post-historical stage), according to Orudzhev, human nature is free from animal instincts, and that nature is now controlled by "the instinct of mind" (Hegel's term), which is specific to "human nature" and fully corresponds to it. In this stage of temporal being, social relations between people do not originate from inherited animal instincts (which in history have taken the form of wars, slavery, dictatorships etc.), but are based on friendship as a source of new ethical relations between people, as Aristotle would have said, had he not taken an absolute view of the perceptions of non-historical time that were typical of his period (see his "Nicomachean Ethics").

In 1969, Orudzhev was appointed a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at his alma mater, Lomonosov Moscow State University, a post he would occupy for the next 16 years. In 1985, he embarked upon a two-year as director of the Institute of Philosophy and Law at the Academy of Sciences in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1986, he edited and co-authored "Dialectical logic", published in Moscow. Between 1987 and 1992, he was professor of philosophy at the Higher Party School.

While studying history of philosophy and the natural sciences in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Orudzhev explored the problems of theoretical proof and how theoretical proof differs from empirical and formal logical proofs, as well as the problem of producing a systematic exposition of dialectical logic. In the 1980s, in a book published by Cornell University in the US, the Sovietologist Prof. James Scanlan wrote that Orudzhev's work meant dialectical logic cannot be rejected in the US, as had been the case previously USSR specialists, because the issue had been raised to a level that merited scientific respect. Orudzhev paid a great deal of attention to developing a method for the analysis of intermediate links in order to create systems of scientific theory. The significance of this last aspect for the research of theory systems in biology was highlighted by a research group led by A.M.Chernukh, an academician from the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.

Zaid Orudzhev was born in Baku, entered the Faculty of Philosophy at Lomonosov Moscow State University in the early 1950s, graduating in 1955. For the next 12 years, he taught at a number of educational institutions back in Baku (mainly at the state university), during which time he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis on "The problems of dialectical logic in the economic research of Karl Marx". In 1967-1969 he founded and was at the head of the department of philosophy at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology.

Zaid Melikovich Orudzhev (Russian: Заи́д Ме́ликович Ору́джев; born on April 4, 1932) is an Azerbaijani-born Russian academic specialising in the history of philosophy, dialectical logic and sociological methodology. He is a doctor of philosophy and currently a professor at the Moscow State Academy for Business Administration.

In the early 21st century, Orudzhev has been studying the emergence of man from the animal world (a problem identified by Darwin), and has developed the concepts of "the past" and "factors of the past", as well as the concept of the "accumulated past", as substantial concepts in "human nature". Orudzhev defines the past, according to Nietzsche, only humans possess, as a unity of time that has already passed and a human being's accumulated activities. This view of the past enabled humans to include internal time in their life activities, as a result of which they also started to grasp logic. Incidentally, Aristotle wrote: "What is past cannot possibly be other than it is, as Agathon has well said, saying – one thing alone not even God can do, to make undone whatever hath been done". But humans did indeed emerge from the "accumulated past", from a source to which even gods have no access.

So, at the start of the 21st century, the problem of hominids transforming into humans in the proper sense of the phrase has acquired a philosophical explanation, on the basis of the discovery of the logic governing the development of the essence of human nature – mind.

Contrary to most attempts to solve this problem on the basis of "pure naturalism", and specifically using biological methods, Orudzhev believes that the problem of the shift from animal nature to a qualitatively different nature – human nature – can only be solved through a philosophy that relies on results obtained not only through biology, but also through psychology, linguistics, sociology and other sciences. The problem must be formulated with attention being paid to the relevant intermediate links, which are not taken into consideration by individual sciences. Orudzhev believes that Darwin's theory still (almost 150 years since the 1871 publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex) cannot prove the natural origin of man in the proper sense, because it does not depart from "pure biologism" in its understanding of human nature.