Guest Editor's Introduction

Abstract

One of the most interesting tendencies in contemporary philosophical developments in Russia is the basic elaboration of issues of the philosophy of culture. The interest in this problematic, which appeared back in the Soviet period in response to, among other developments, Western research in the realm of the theory of culture and civilization, led to the formation of a new philosophical discipline called culturology in Russia. For all the nuances and distinctions in the treatment of culturology and its subject matter by representatives of different schools and tendencies of the contemporary philosophy of culture in Russia, its most widely accepted descriptive definition is the one cited in a culturology textbook: "The object of culturology is the genesis, functioning, and development of culture as a specifically human mode of life, which unfolds historically as a process of cultural transmission, externally similarly to, but nonetheless distinct from, life in nature. The task of culturology is to construct a 'genetics of culture' that would not only explain the historico-cultural process but would also predict and control it."'1