In an obituary appearing in the English-language newspaper The Guardian, he was cited as "a man who was widely considered to be one of the more significant thinkers of the age and Russia's greatest philosopher.

Being a poor student of mathematics, chemistry and physics, Alexander was expelled from school twice,[4] but at this time he learned Latin and some other languages out of sheer curiosity.

"[2]His investigations and theoretical observations of the role played by thinking and philosophy in ancient South Asian culture and society were viewed with suspicion by some as a subtly indirect way of attacking the Soviet system.

Knowing themselves to be likely targets of KGB surveillance, he and his fellow Indologists would gather in a room of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies where they would enter into "fiery debates... in Sanskrit.

Influenced by German Idealism, Mamardashvili was a Deputy Editor of the leading journal, Voprosy Filosofii ("Problems of Philosophy"), and was also a principal representative of the so-called "Moscow School of Methodology."

Participants in the Moscow School seminars included: Alexander Zinoviev, Evald Ilyenkov, Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Boris Grushin, Lefebvre, and others.

This abstract and complex text, combining Western and Eastern terms, is considered by some to be the most significant philosophical work written in the Russian language.

[2] The text: "...explores the theory of consciousness, and is a kind of philosophical conversation between [Mamardashvili and Piatigorsky], from the respective perspectives of Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology and the Buddhist School of Vijnanavada.

"[2]Written in the two years before Piatigorsky left the Soviet Union for Britain in 1974, the manuscript was spirited out of the country by the British-Czech social philosopher Ernest Gellner.

It is worth noticing that the text was written in a deteriorating situation of renewed political repression of the Russian intelligentsia by the Soviet state.

He joined the staff of the School of Oriental and African Studies, The University of London, as lecturer in 1975 with the commendation of Berlin who at one point is reported to have said: "Piatigorsky is quite simply a genius!

As a novelist he joins the select company of those few philosophers who successfully managed to cross over into the world of literature, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Umberto Eco, and Alexander Zinoviev.