Gnoseology of the Kyiv Philosophical School: the Establishment and Approval of the Worldview-Rationalist Paradigm of Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

The study is devoted to the analysis of the origins, essence, scholarly, and cultural significance of the phenomenon of the Kyiv philosophical school. In the late 1950s – during the 1960s, Ukraine formed relatively favorable conditions for the development of the original direction of the philosophical research studying the logic of scientific knowledge, which resulted in the formulation of a worldview-rationalist concept of constructing scientific theories and obtaining reliable verified knowledge. Considering the impact of this school’s achievements on educational and research practice, we can talk about the paradigmatic status of this generalization due to its acquisition of a strong sociocultural sounding. Thus, Ukrainian science has received logical and methodological guidelines for the stages and processes of scientific research, the importance of various forms of knowledge organization, including ideas, problems, hypotheses, concepts, theories, and, ultimately, systematic knowledge about a particular object in the form of the normative science. The Kyiv philosophical school’s achievements significantly contributed to the formation of the style of scholarly thinking, refuting the incapability of the methodology of science declared by the official Marxist philosophy with its dogmatic regulators of the learning process as a party affiliation principle. The main centers for producing the worldview-rationalist philosophical ideas were Taras Shevchenko State University of Kyiv and the Institute of Philosophy of the UkrSSR Academy of Sciences. Its most famous representatives were P. Kopnin, V. Shynkaruk, M. Popovych, S. Krymskyi, and I. Bychko.