PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEAR FUTURE

Abstract

The question of philosophy’s near future is inevitably bound up with the transformation of the fundamental categories that have structured philosophical knowledge throughout the history of the discipline. Classical philosophy proceeded from the assumption of the relative stability of such concepts as truth, being, reason, and subject, treating them as universal foundations of thought. The contemporary intellectual situation, however, is characterized by a radical problematization of these foundations, thereby requiring a reconsideration of the very conditions of philosophical reflection.

Particularly indicative in this regard is Michel Foucault’s well-known formulation: “Man is an invention of recent date… and one perhaps nearing its end” (Foucault, M. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966)

This thesis points not to anthropological pessimism, but to a structural shift in the epistemological configuration of knowledge. What is at stake is the crisis of the classical model of the subject, which, in modern philosophy, functioned as the privileged center of certainty and the source of the rational organization of experience.

Concurrently, an alternative model of rationality emerges, described by V. S. Stepin as post-nonclassical: “Knowledge increasingly deals with complex self-developing systems into which the subject of cognition itself is incorporated” (Stepin, V. S. Theoretical Knowledge. Moscow: Progress-Tradition)

Within this epistemological perspective, the subject loses its status as an external observer and is instead regarded as an element of the systems under investigation. Consequently, the classical opposition between the knower and the known is undermined, producing far-reaching implications for the philosophical understanding of truth, rationality, and reality.

The near future of philosophy, therefore, is determined not by the accumulation of new doctrinal constructions, but by a radical rethinking of the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of thought.