A.P. Ogurtsov on the humanitarian and anthropological turn

Abstract

The author discusses the concept of the humanitarian-anthropological turn formulated by the famous Russian philosopher Alexander Pavlovich Ogurtsov. He analyzes the views of V. Dilthey, showing that he is not only the initiator of the humanitarian discourse, but also, in fact, develops a new humanitarian and spiritually oriented direction of philosophy alternative to the natural science approach. The author analyzes the situation that necessitated the development of this direction, as well as the concepts of "life", "history", "understanding", "expression" and "experience", which Dilthey puts at the foundation of his philosophical system. He shows that the essential feature of the listed concepts is a double modality and discursivity. On the one hand, history (respectively, life, understanding, expression, experience) is "singular", that is, it does not change according to some law, but due to random circumstances, on the other hand, life changes quite lawfully, under the influence of the mechanisms of culture, language, economics, human relationships, technology. Dilthey's interest in the holistic analysis of life is explained. The author shows that within the framework of humanitarian and anthropological study, the integrity of life is determined by a number of factors: the problem that the researcher solves, the narratives and texts available to him, the methodology of humanitarian cognition. In other humanitarian studies, these factors will change, therefore, the integrity of life will also change. It turns out that the integrity of life, over which Dilthey struggled, is not independent of the researcher, his personality and life, it is constituted in the very process of humanitarian cognition, partly as a singular, partly a natural phenomenon.