Young Merab Mamardashvili, his Department and his friends: making of a philosopher

The early works of Merab Mamardashvili are usually neglected by admirers and critics alike. In this paper, I focus on the very early period of Mamardashvili’s development as a professional philosopher putting it in the context of the thinker’s interactions with the intellectual community in 1950s and then current discussions about the perspectives of professional philosophy in the USSR. Special attention is paid to a small society of dedicated young philosophers (known as Diastankury) with whom he shared logical and philosophical interests. In the paper, I trace their influence on young Mamardashvili’s perception of his own professional tasks in the period when he was busy with the development of dialectical logic. In the final part of the article, I explore the emergence of Mamardashvili’s original ideas about history of philosophy and propose the appropriate methods with which to study it.