Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev (1877-1954), Russian émigré philosopher and religious thinker, was born in Moscow in 1877 into a family of a sworn attorney of the Moscow Court of Justice. He studied at the University of Moscow under the Russian jurist and philosopher P. I. Novgorodtsev and later at the University of Marburg under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Upon the publication in 1914 of his dissertation, Etika Fikhte (Fichte's ethics), he received a doctorate from the University of Moscow. Vysheslavtsev taught philosophy there until he was expelled from his homeland along with other Russian philosophers and intellectuals because of their anti-Marxism critique in 1922.

He first lived in Berlin, then in 1924, Vysheslavtsev moved to Paris, where he taught at the Orthodox Theological Institute and was associated with Nikolai Berdiaev. He soon became a leading figure in the Russian émigré philosophical community lecturing and writing on questions of metaphysics, ethics, philosophical psychology and social philosophy. Vysheslavtsev was particularly noted for his study (begun in an early work on the ethics of Fichte) of the irrational as the sphere of human contact with the Absolute. Subsequently he developed this theme through the application of concepts of depth psychology to ethics and to the interpretation of Christian doctrine.

From the time of the German occupation of France until his death in 1954 he lived in Switzerland.