“CONCRETE METAPHYSICS” OF THE SCIENCE OF THE PHILOSOPHER FR. PAVEL FLORENSKY

Abstract

The name of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky is widely known as a philosopher, an Orthodox priest who tragically died in 1937. It is little known that he is also an outstanding mathematician, physicist, electrical engineer, who founded a new scientific direction - materials science, who made a great contribution to the development of this direction. His works devoted to science contain many deep thoughts of philosophical content, relevant now. His, as he defined it - “concretely metaphysical” ideas, are of interest, both from the point of view of the philosophical approach and the applied content. In particular, he substantiated the geometric and physical meaning of imaginary numbers and put forward the idea of imaginary space; approach to physics and mathematics as a symbolic language; computing devices based on various physical laws. This article is devoted to these and his other ideas.