Positive Foundations of the Axiological Aspect of Historical-Philosophical Research

Abstract

The paper examines the axiological aspect of historical-philosophical research. It is important to demonstrate that this issue was widely discussed at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, and, therefore, a certain axiological aspect in historical-philosophical investigations was elaborated and interpreted. To solve this issue, we turn to the question of what are the scientific premises of historical-philosophical work and whether they form the necessary foundation to acknowledge the scientific status of the history of thought. In our opinion, it is history of philosophy that provides the scholars with factual set of notions, and so it forms this field of research as a definite (or strict) science. We consider fruitful to analyze historical responds to the challenge of scientific status of philosophy and its history as well as to compare the history of philosophy and anthropology. In our opinion, many peculiarities of anthropological investigations are also quite typical for the historical-philosophical work, and such comparison enlarges the scientific perspective of philosophy as a human cognitive practice. A historian of philosophy cannot ignore ontological foundations of different cultures in his research since it is the source of his ability to adequately interpret the subject-matter of his research. Like ethnographers, the historians of philosophy reveal the meanings and distinguish the attitudes that various thinkers, being the representatives of their own culture and epoch, had taken into consideration.