The Ideas of Cultural–Historical Epistemology in Russian Philosophy of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Modern epistemology adopted the idea of historicism, of the historicity of knowledge and the self-consciousness of the cognizer. The research, undertaken within cultural–historical epistemology, also spread in the context of the prevailing tendencies in the sphere of modern epistemology. The specificity of this type of epistemology is related to a special interpretation of the history of cognition. On this interpretation knowledge represents a cultural phenomenon that has an existentially-symbolical meaning for the cognizer. Therefore this type of epistemology returns us to the dimension of knowledge, which has in fact been lost today. It returns us to the original antique notion of knowledge as “good,” as something that changes the person who acquires it. And here in this context comes forth such a feature of knowledge as its integrity. At the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Russian philosophers turned to the problem field of “integral knowledge,” the core of which lies in the unity of the integral and cognitive, which is reflected in the concreteness of knowledge. Such an understanding of knowledge enabled the articulation of a number of ideas that enriched European traditions of socio-humanitarian research and influenced the development of semiotics and structuralism both in Europe and in Russia. The ideas of R. Jakobson that stimulated the structure-semiotic research in the first half of the twentieth century are very well-known to world humanity science. Yet their epistemological potential is related to the idea of the integral knowledge. The epistemological turn towards historicism in semiotics in Russia was accomplished by G. Shpet. Jakobson communicated with Shpet at the Moscow linguistic circle in the 1920s. They both referred to the ideas of Husserl, and, as Jakobson acknowledged himself, he borrowed many ideas from Shpet—in particular, the idea of semiotics. Shpet’s helped implement the idea of “integral knowledge” that opened a perspective of the analysis of knowledge as an open symbolic sign system. This methodological approach appears to be especially topical nowadays in the sphere of humanities, which scientific character does not exclude historicism. The ideas of Russian philosophers, then, provide a productive context immediately as well as long-term prospects for developing the methodology of the humanities. The concepts that prevail in modern methodology accentuate the historical relativity and the outer social determinacy of scientific knowledge. Meanwhile the problem of the cultural–historical status of the humanities and the problem of addressing the idea of “integral knowledge” become increasingly topical and allow the transfer of the epistemological search for the conditions and the landmarks of scientificity.

Keywords:

• Cultural–historical epistemology
• social epistemology
• integrity
• structuralism
• semiotics
• Russian philosophy
• R. Jakobson
• G. Shpet
• P. Yurkevich