On the structure of reflective philosophical knowledge

Abstract

The author draws a distinction between the reflective (epistemic) tradition of philosophiz­ing and the value philosophy, which perceives the world correlating it with the needs and interests of people as well as viewing it through the prism of the man’s value preferences. The author derives this distinction from the difference between denotative judgments about being and prescriptive judgments about the proper. These two types of judgments are claimed to be related but not reducible to each other and not derived from one an­other. The author defends the right of a refleсtive philosophy to speak in the language of verifiable judgments of truth, while opposing the position of cognitive imperialism, which absolutizes the truth and turns it into the substance of the human spirit. The author treats the anthropological and gnoseological interpretations of the reflective philosophy, which limit its subject to the analysis of the man in his praxiological, axiological and gnoseological relation to the world, as insufficient. The article defends the now unfash­ionable substantive understanding of philosophy, according to which its object is not the man, but the world surrounding and embracing us, and its subject is the possible unity of the world considered in the aspects of its integrative wholeness and taxonomic univer­sality. An integrative approach that looks for substantive distinctions and connections be­tween the subsystems of the world, is carried out by natural philosophy, social philoso­phy, and philosophy of consciousness. Philosophical ontology has a different objective. It begins with the axiomatic problem of the existence of the world, the relation between the real and the ideal, and proceeds to verifiable judgments about the referential relations between the various "realms of being”. The world is considered by the discipline of on­tology in a conceptual projection “the separate – the singular – the particular – the univer­sal”, which is different from a conceptual projection “the whole – the part”. The author argues for the importance of the ontological problematics, which is of great methodologi­cal importance for non-philosophical (first of all, social and humanitarian) sciences.