Abstract

Kazakhstan inherited a strong philosophical school from the Soviet period. It was the Almaty school of dialectical logic, led for many years by the academician Zhabaikhan Abdildin. The school studied logic, the theory of cognition, and the method of the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. Its work was serious and original. Yet the school was Marxist and grew inside the Soviet system. After independence this legacy became hard to place. The global decolonial turn now asks post-Soviet nations to sort colonial imports from native thought. This article asks one direct question. Should Kazakhstan keep the Almaty school, or treat it as a colonial layer to remove? The authors argue for keeping it, but with open eyes. The school was both a Soviet product and a real local achievement. Its members built national institutions, and some later turned to a philosophy of sovereign Kazakhstan on their own. The school also shared its central problems with Evald Ilyenkov, whose work now draws fresh attention around the world. The method at its core is not a mere technique but a philosophy of thought with real depth, and it can be joined with the Kazakh tradition rather than set against it.It concludes that intellectual sovereignty is served not by separating dialectical logic from Kazakh thought but by synthesizing the two, as Kazakh philosophers such as Mukan Orynbekov already began to do.

Key words: dialectical logic; Almaty school; Zhabaikhan Abdildin; intellectual sovereignty; decolonial theory; Kazakh philosophy