Anthropocentrism as a paradigm of legal science: historical origins and modern context

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the historical origins of anthropocentrism as a basic paradigm of developmentof modern jurisprudence and the peculiarities of its transformation in today’s conditions. It is noted that with the beginning of the Renaissance anthropocentrism finally began to take shape in a fundamental system of ideas and principles of philosophical and ideological significance, which laid radical changes in European public consciousness associated with the formation of an autonomous worldview, which is completely self-sufficient, free and does not depend on any supernatural influences. In the future, these ideas were significantly developed during the Reformation and the Enlightenment, which became a natural consequence of the establishment of the principle of individualism in social life. It is on the basis of methodological ideas of the Enlightenment was finally formed liberal ideology with an appropriate system of its main trends in various sectors and areas of public life. Emphasis is placed on the fact that during a long historical period, liberal ideology has passed a complex and contradictory path of its development, as a result of which it has acquired the qualities of global scale and the basic basis of building a modern democratic state governed by the rule of law. The peculiarity of the current stage of development of liberalism is the gradual radicalization of the content of its main provisions, which is associated with rapid scientific and technological progress and the functioning of a new information and technological reality, within which each individual receives almost unlimited opportunities to create and disseminate an ideas and concepts of their virtual existence, including any identities. As a result of research the following conclusions are made: 1. Centuries of social practice of free development of individuals in our time has led to a special type of civilization, the main feature of which is that it develops in opposition to the traditional type of culture, which increasingly takes aggressive forms of expression at the macro and micro levels. In this context, we are talking about the fact that modern radical liberalism (libertarianism) rejects the objective and true essence of the surrounding phenomena and processes, thus turning any object of scientific or other way of knowing the diverse reality into a subjective opinion about it. 2. Modern liberal ideology and postmodernist discourse significantly complicates the main task of legal science –the development and systematization of objective knowledge about state and legal phenomena, the laws of their functioning and development. The latter, in turn, is due to the fact that the unlimited freedom to choose the original axiomatic principles of scientific activity, the basic semantic contexts and values of its implementation, leads to many answers to the challenges posed by legal science. In this way, the only scientific truth based on the so-called «dogmatic» or «sacred» component of a certain culture, which constitutes the whole process of further proving the correctness or falsity of a certain idea, concept or theory with the corresponding rationale, is denied. Keywords: anthropocentrism, legal science, humanism, law, liberalism, rationalism, postmodern, Internet, virtual reality.