Table Of Content-1ro 1zermPan rinciples
A.S Bogomolov
oft heT heory
of
theH istorPriocessca l
inP hilosophy
TranslbayH.t eCdam pbell
CreightM.o A.n, (Oxon)
l�fPROGRnEl§ PUBUSHERS
Designed Ьу Alexandп SaveluD
Т. И. ОАзерма11, А. С. Боrомыов
ОСНОВЫ ТЕОРИИ ИСТОРИКО-ФИЛОСОФСКОГО ПРОЦЕССА
На анLtuйском языке
@ Издательство <Наука:., 1983
Engfuh tranl!lation@ Progreм Pubfuhera 1986
Printed in the Union о/ Sovi6t Socialist RepuЫics
о 0302010000-232 14-86
014(01)-86
CONTENTS
Preface .
Introduction
1. World Outlook a! a Phenomenon of Society's Spiritual Life 27
2. The Specific Features of the Philosophic World Outlook . 56
Philosophy as the Most General Theoretical Outlook . 56
The Basic Question of Philosophy. The Unity and Diversity
of the Philosophic Problematic 77
3. The Origin of Philosophy . . . . . . 102
Philosophy and Society. The Social Roots of Philosophical
Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Myth, Epic, and Scientific Knowledge. The Problem of the
Sources of Philosophy . 116
The Moulding of Philosophy . 138
4. From Arutotle to Hegel . 178
The History of Philosophy in Antiquity and the Middle Ages 183
The Renaissance and Modern Times. From 'Scholasticism'
to Science . . . 203
Hegel's History of Philosophy and Marximi . . . . 223
5. Basic Features of the Process of the History of Philosophy 253
The Evolution of Philo110phy a! a Philosophic Problem 253
The Differentiation, Divergence, and Polarisation of Philo
llOphies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
Continuity and Progress in the Development of Philosophies 286
Conclusion . 328
Name Index . 337
Subject Index . 343
Preface
Historical philosophical studies have always had a significant
place in the development of philosophy in the USSR. Lenin's
work On the Significance of Militant Materialism, which was
a testament of this brilliant continuer of the work of Marx and
Engels, oriented Marxist philosophers on critical assimilation of
the clasiscal philosophic heritage so as to take dialectical and
historical materialism creatively further. His Philosophical Note
books are a remarkable example of a scientific, philosophical
reworking of pre-Marxist philosophy, above all of Hegel's dia
lectical idealism, which he evaluated as a theory closer in es
sence to the philosophy of Marxism than the preceding metaphy
sical materialism.
Monographs had already been published in the 1920s by So
viet historians of philosophy on the main historical forms of
pre-Marxist materialism and the history of dialectics. The
number of publications grew constantly in subsequent years. The
discusison on G. F. Alexandrov's History of West European Phi
losophy, held in 1947, brought the methodological problems of
philosophical historiography to the fore, which naturally-be
came a matter of special consideration in the six-volume History
of Philosophy, 1957-65, and in a number of group works and
individual monographs published in recent years. Development
of the history of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and of Russian
and Soviet philosophical thought, and a critical analysis of con
temporary Western philosophy, all made a comprehensive sub
stantiation, concretisation, and further development of the meth
odological principles of historical studies in philosophy par
ticularly necessary.
In 1967 the first international symposium on methodological
problems of the history of philosophy was held in Moscow, on the
initiative of Soviet philosophers. Other symposiums on these
matters have been held since in several other socialist countries,
in which Soviet philosophers have regularly taken part.
The methodological studies in this field have not, of course,
exhausted the analysis of the principles of Marxist study
of various philosophic theories. The work of recent years has
been mainly devoted to a detailed clarification of the specific
features of philosophic knowledge, and of the specific patterns
of the evolution of philosophy. This new stage in methodologic
al studies can be described as development of the theory of the
historical process in philosophy.1 The need for them is particul
arly obvious in the light of the task of a theoretical generalisa
tion of the history of philosophy posed by Lenin as one of the
conditions for comprehensive development of the theory of knowl
edge of Marxism.
Preface to this book has been written by Academician T. I Oi
zerman and Professor A. S. Bogomolov; Introduction, chapters
I, II, V and Conclusion by T. I. Oizerman; chapters III and
IV by A. S. Bogomolov.
1 We would cite the following in particular (all in Russian): V. U. Ba
bushkin. On th6 Natur6 of Philosophic Knowl4dg6 (Moscow, 1978);
B. V. Bogdanov. unin'.s Principles for Analysing th6 History of Philo
sophy (Moscow, 1970); G. A. Brutian. Essays in the Analysis of Phi
losophic Knowl6dg6 (Erevan, 1979); M. T. Iovchuk. uninism, Philo
sophic Traditions, and Today (Moscow, 1970); V. A. Malinin. The
Theory of the History of Philosophy (Moscow, 1976). A. V. Potemkin.
On the Specific Character of Philosophic Knowledge (Rostov-on-Don,
1970). The authors of the present work have also published several stud
ies in this range.
Introduction
Historicism, dialectical materialist historicism, it goes without
saying, differs in principle not only from that of the idealists
who were forerunners of Marx and Engels, but also from modern
irrationalist, and relativist-pluralist conceptions of 'historicity'. It
is a scientifically substantiated historicism; not just the theoreti
cally sumem d-up experience of world history but also historicism
confirmed by the subsequent development of mankind.
Scientific socialism became possible through a scientific de
monstration of the historically transient character of the capi
talist formation. In contrast to the utopian socialists, who con
demned capitalism as an unjust social system incompatible with
human nature, Marx and Engels scientifically substantiated the
objective, historical necessity of the transition from capitalism to
socialism. They demonstrated the insolvency of the main ideo
logical dogma of classical capitalist political economy, according
to which capitalist relations were natural and rational, and in
essence the sole possible ones, at least in civilised society. The
founders of political economy had therefore made the economic
relations of capitalist society the subject matter of their science.
To that illusory, dogmatic notion Engels opposed the following
thesis:
Political economy is therefore essentially a historical
science. It deals with material which is historical,
that is, corutantly changing; it must lint investigate
the special laws of each individual stage in the evolu
tion of production and exchange, and only when it
has completed this investigation will it be able to es
tablieh th� few quite general laws which hold good
for production and exchange in general.'
Historical materialism is the consistent philosophical develop
ment of the dialectically understood principle of historicism. Its
7
opponents often claim that this principle is applicable only to
history in the narrow sense of the term, i.e. to the history of
society. They counterpose the natural to the historical, thus in
terpreting historicism as a partial principle whose applicability
is very limited even in sociology. But the basic fact that develop
ment is universal and absolute is thereby ignored.
Development does not, of course, exhaust the whole variety
and diversity of social and natural proces.ses Historicism does
not exclude other principles of investigation; it only excludes
a metaphysical mode of thinking incompatible with the theory
of development, whose universal significance is constantly being
confirmed by the development of science as well as by historical
experience.
The philosophical and methodological significance of the prin
ciple of historicism is particularly obvious when we study the
history and historical past of mankind. The historian is not a
witness of the events he describes; he describes them as pheno
mena of another time which he must treat differently than events
of the present day. "But in order to comprehend the present we
turn to the past, because there can be no scientific understand
ing of today through isolated consideration of a given historical
existence. Understanding of the present presupposes comprehen
sion_ of the preceding stages of social development. Understand
ing is by no means a direct process, whatever the beliefs of the
adherents of intuitionism. The subject of knowledge is such just
because he disposes of certain knowledge, convictions, and ex
perience of research, etc. But the subject matter of knowledge
is a mediated object, if only because it exists in a variety of rela
tions with other things, is the result of previous development,
and becomes the object of study only in relation to a certain
level of development of knowledge. The universal significance
of the principle of historicism also gets its necessary expression
in the fact that knowing thought itself, and research activity, are
considered historically, i.e. as developing and changing both their
content and their form.
In every epoch, and therefore also in ours, theoretical
thought is a hi!torical product, which at different
- times assumes very different forms and, therewith, very
different contents. The science of thought is there
fore, like every other, a lilitorical science, the science
of the historical development of human thought.'
a
It is hardly necessary to demonstrate that this thesis of Engels's
is not only directly related to logic (and of course to dialectical
logic as well), but also has a bearing on the history of science
(and, it goes without saying, the history of philosophy), since
it is a matter in both cases of history, of the development of
cognising thought.
Science is discovering new, previously unknown phenomena,
disclosing the relations between them, and finding the patterns
that determine these relations and enable us to foresee the course
of events. The empirical statement, and sometimes simplified
interpretation, of that fact often lead to an underestimation of
the history of science as a discipline; it is allegedly concerned
only with study of what has already been investigated and is
known, i.e. with what can no longer interest the researcher. The
history of physics (or of any other science) differs in its methods
from physics; that circumstance is employed as the 'basis' for
considering that the history of science is a secondary matter. It
is one thing to discover the laws of nature, and another to des
cribe how it was done. That consideration, quite correct in it
seU, is based however on a false idea that the history of science
simply describes what science has already done, surpassed, and
sometimes refuted.
There are various levels of investigation and exposition of
the history of science of course. Some of them, possibly, present
no interest to the scientist engaged in research, i.e. in tackling
still unresolved problems. But that does not justify a scorning of
the history of science, or of research that is of essential signifi
cance for posing and solving its latest, urgent problems, even
when these are not directly linked with the preceding develop
ment of science. And it is not just that scholars who have studi
ed the various points of view, conceptions, and theories about
the matters that interest them, and have analysed them critically,
are insured to some extent against the mistakes their predeces
sors made, against the one-sided approach that is quite often a
consequence of ignorance or lack of information about other
points of view, and against dogmatism, the cliches of which are
eroded by critical, historical inquiry. The new facts, discoveries,
and advances of science throw new light on old problems that
seem already solved, thanks to which a kind of negation of the
negation occurs, i.e. a return to an earlier posing of the question
9
