Alexei Nikolaevich Leont'ev
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Alexei Nikolaevich Leont'ev (Template:Lang-ru) (1903-1979), is the founder of activity theory.
A.N. Leont'ev worked with Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Alexander Luria (1902-1977) from 1924 to 1930, collaborating on the development of a Marxist psychology as a response to behaviourism and the focus on the stimulus-response mechanism as explanation for human behaviour. Although both Vygotsky and Luria can be credited with some responsibility for the emergence of activity theory, Leont'ev developed it into its fullest form. Leont'ev left Vygotsky's group in Moscow in 1931, to take up a position in Kharkov. He continued to work with Vygotsky for some time but, eventually, there was a split, although they continued to communicate with one another on scientific matters (Veer and Valsiner, 1991). For Leont'ev, ‘activity’ consisted of those processes ‘that realise a person’s actual life in the objective world by which he is surrounded, his social being in all the richness and variety of its forms’ (Leont’ev 1977). Leont'ev returned to Moscow in 1950 as Head of the Psychology Department at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State Lomonosov University. He died of a heart attack in 1979.
External links
Leont’ev, A.N. (1977). Activity and consciousness, in, Philosophy in the USSR: problems of dialectical materialism. (pp. 180-202) Moscow: Progress Publishers. http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1977/leon1977.htm.
Veer, R.v.D. and Valsiner, J. Understanding Vygotsky: a quest for synthesis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.