ABOUT SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF RUSSIAN CIVILIZATION: THE KEY TO SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL CREATIVITY

Abstract

Opponents of Russian culture have spent a lot of effort to prove that our culture has not reached the level of development at which European and Western culture in general is. It did not reach it, if only because it did not develop its own national philosophy. The article shows why such a false idea has developed in the minds of Western ideologists. The fact is that they are looking for Russian philosophy only in a purely religious area, in the so-called “Berdyaevshchina”, far from the scientific achievements of Russian civilization. And in scientific achievements, as the author shows on a number of examples given in this article, national philosophy is contained. They do not notice it because it is presented in a logical form, mediated by a special dialectical logic, which was later rediscovered in the fundamental ontology of the German thinker Martin Heidegger. Since this logic permeates both the sphere of scientific and philosophical thinking, Russian philosophy, the Russian national worldview, originates in it. This can be seen in the example of the logical structure of Lobachevsky’s non-Euclidean geometry, it is the origin of Russian philosophy, Russian national worldview. It is no coincidence that D.I. Mendeleev saw in Lobachevsky’s geometry something more than a particular mathematical discipline of thought, and said: “Geometric knowledge formed the basis of all exact science, and the originality of Lobachevsky’s geometry was the dawn of the independent development of sciences in Russia. The scientific sowing will sprout for the harvest of the people...”. An equally high assessment of Lobachevsky’s geometry was voiced by prof. V.F. Kagan: “I take the liberty of asserting that it was easier to stop the sun, that it was easier to move the earth than to reduce the sum of angles in a triangle, to reduce the parallels to convergence and push the perpendiculars to the straight line to divergence”. This is one of the results of applying dialectical logic.