THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

Description

What is the nature of science? What are the factors conditioning it? Where lies the boundary between science and the sphere of everyday experience, mythological-poetical, artistic-symbolic thinking, morality, religion, and other areas of the social super-structure? These highly topical issues are discussed in the present volume in the context of a comprehensive discourse on ancient and contemporary science. The authors have closely studied the general and particular criteria of scientificity, the origin of science from pre-scientific forms of knowledge, and the dynamics of scientific rationality at the various stages of mankind’s history.

Typology of knowledge is worked out, scientific types are round analysis of the phenomenon of science as a specific type of conceptual processing of reality, one that is subject to autonomous laws of development and self-change.

Viktor Ilyin and Anatoli Kalinkin are among the leading scientists of Moscow University specialising in problems of the philosophy of science. Their original works – monographs, pamphlets, and articles – are well-known in the USSR.

Viktor Ilyin, Candidate of Philosophy, Associate Professor of Moscow University, has studied the theory of knowledge and the history of science at the Department of Philosophy of that University. He is a major researcher in the field of epistemology.

Anatoli Kalinkin, Candidate of Philosophy, Associate Professor of Moscow University, has studied logic and methodological problems of the humanities. He has obtained some highly important results in the field.