My paper examines the influential “New Ideas” series published by the St. Petersburg publishing house Obrazovanie, which played a significant role in reshaping key disciplines in both the natural sciences and the humanities—including physics, chemistry, and educational science—in the Russian Empire on the eve of the First World War. I explore how and why these collections of translations and scholarly summaries came to function as disciplinary journals during a period of rapid intellectual transformation. The driving force behind the publishing house was Gedaly Kotlyar, a publisher and translator outside the academic establishment who is best known for translating the works of Ernst Mach into Russian. Particular attention will be paid to the philosophy within the “New Ideas” series. Its popularity among a broad readership suggests that philosophy—even in forms far removed from the Marxism that attracted many young intellectuals—was understood as a field extending well beyond either the traditional "first of the sciences" or a narrowly technical discipline reserved for specialists.