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The greatly increased interest in Orestes A. Brownson will probably restore him to his real importance in the history of Catholicism in the United States. Classifying him as a philosopher has caused him to be seriously neglected, because Catholic philosophers in the United States, since the revival of the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, have been very contemptuous of American philosophers. As a matter of fact, in his own day, before the Thomist revival, his ontologism bewildered even his admirers. Significantly, Brownson did not call himself a “philosopher” but a “publicist” — a very much neglected title in the United States.

Pre-Soviet Russian philosophy had very little epistemological tradition of its own. “In Russian philosophy — so far as one can judge from its century and a half of development — there are certain specific characteristics which in general relegate theory of knowledge to a secondary place. With the exception of a small group of orthodox Kantians, Russian philosophers have tended in the solution of epistemological problems to ontologism, i.e. the recognition that cognition is not the primary and defining principle in man. ... we may say briefly that Russian ontologism expresses not the priority of ‘reality’ to knowledge, but the inclusion of knowledge in our relationship to the world, our ‘activity’ in it.”1 It was with the 1917 Revolution and the consequent shake-up in Russian society that the problem of knowledge came to Russia. It came as a part of ‘dialectical materialism’, a philosophic aggregate composed of selected passages from the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.2