History of human intelligence

INTRODUCTION

The history of human society is not only and not so much a chain of historical events as a history of the development of the human essence, the “essential human forces”. One of the most important components of this process is the development of the human intellect.

Being the second, along with the ability to work – the material transformation of the surrounding world and man himself, the fundamental ability of man, the thought undergoes the most complicated process of development from its animal predecessor to the thought of modern man. Lacking absolute autonomy and independence, thought develops as a result and means of material labor, transforming the natural environment and the man himself in the direction necessary for his existence and development. A thought must therefore pass its historical stages of development, or, otherwise, its history acts as a sequence of historical types of intelligence, i.e. certain ways of thinking, or paradigms.

The life of society always includes the remnants or fragments of the former ways of human existence. To an even greater extent, this pattern is inherent in the spiritual life of society. The intellect of modern man includes fragments, and often whole icebergs of the past historical types of thinking: mythological and religious. The opposite is also possible – the historical type of intellect born in the last century may still be not dominant in the ordinary, and often in the scientific thinking of the twentieth century.

Assuming his thinking is contemporary, a person can think largely in the ways of primitive or medieval intellect. This phenomenon is especially noticeable in periods of historical reaction, a reversal of social development back when the types of thinking overcome by history temporarily begin to revive. The history of society provides many examples of such recurrent movements of the human intellect. The history of human intelligence is the main, pivotal line in the development of spiritual culture. The study of this story is an important condition for the knowledge of modern intelligence, its further development.

This book is a summary of the content of a special course that the author has been reading for a number of years at Perm University. The proposed publication is the only one in the domestic philosophical literature. Due to the immensity of the topic in the special course, only the major milestones in the history of the development of human intelligence are considered, mainly in the form in which they were expressed in a kind of quintessence of human intelligence – the philosophical thought of each of historical eras.

NATURE OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

The human intellect, or the ability of abstract thinking, is one of the most important essential properties of man. Man, from the standpoint of scientific materialism, is not a local and random episode of evolution, but a necessary result of the infinite development of matter, its “supreme color”, arising “with iron necessity”, embedded “in the very nature of matter”.

The statement about the random nature of the emergence of man in the world, expressed by some philosophers and naturalists, is in clear contradiction with the underlying trends of modern science, which in the era of the modern scientific and technological revolution convincingly showed that man is the result of a single natural world chemical and biological forms of matter.

Man is a microcosm, in an abbreviated and generalized form, carrying in itself an infinite variety of the material world. This led to a unique, albeit naturally arisen way of human existence – the production of its own being and its essence through the transformation of nature. Man is the only education in the world, the being and essence of which is the result of the continuous creation of itself.

By concluding, in a shortened and generalized form, the infinite wealth of the material world, man is capable of infinite knowledge and transformation of the world, the infinite creation of his material and spiritual essence. Human labor and intelligence are endless in nature.

The essence of man as a microcosm determines the meaning of human existence, the meaning of his work and intellectual creativity. The meaning of human existence is not outside man, but in human being itself, in production, the creation of its being and its essence.

The essence and meaning of human existence determine the direction of development of the human essence and the very meaning of existence: man develops into his own essence; the meaning of its existence is deepening, immersion in its inexhaustible human essence, endless deepening and enrichment of its essence.

The development of the human essence occurs in the process of transformation of the natural environment, the creation of a “second nature”. It has, therefore, its own “external reference points” – the exploration of the world in breadth (expansion into space) and inland. However, the human proper in this movement consists in the development of the human essence itself, its movement not outside, but inside itself. Man in his development has no other internal guidelines, except for the development of his essence, deepening into his infinite human essence.

Reasoning more specifically, the meaning of human existence should be presented as an endless complication and enrichment of the creative nature of labor and the creative abilities of human intelligence.

One of the most important essential properties of a person is communication, the relation of a person to a person, including the phenomena of property and freedom. The development of this aspect of human essence consists in the endless enrichment of human relations, the growth of unity, human community and, consequently, freedom.

The free development of each as a condition for the free development of all is the most important principle of the future method of genuine development of human essence. This method involves the complete elimination of the exploitation of man by man, the elimination of those social orders in which a man can act as a means for others, and not the sole goal of social progress.

The greatness and dignity of man lies in the endless possibilities of his labor and intellect. It is quite noteworthy that the statement about the randomness of a person affecting the dignity of man and his intellect itself turns out to be an insignificant thought, nonsense, because a “random person” who is in a casual, superficial, empty attitude to the world could not judge his randomness, because he must be in the necessary attitude towards the world.

The concept of a “random person” is nothing but a hidden form of the “liar paradox”. The intellect revenges itself for its humiliation, turning into nonsense statements about its insignificance.

Modern science, including philosophy, already knows a lot about the essence of human intelligence. The most common nature of the intellect as the ability to display the world in concepts, the laws of thinking, the relationship of intelligence with language, etc. disclosed and explained very thoroughly.

However, there remain deeper levels of the inexhaustible essence of human intellect, to the study of which modern science is still just approaching. In our opinion, those deep levels of human intellect, which are laid in the infinite prehistory of intellect and which “work” in secret activity of the intellect, ensuring its ability to adequately explore the world.

The essence of man, his intellect – accumulate, the synthesis of an infinite sequence of natural entities, forming a natural world process. In the nature of the intellect, therefore, there is something substantial inherent in the physical, chemical, and biological stages of the evolution of the world. The most general theoretical approaches to solving this problem are created in studies of a single natural world process conducted by the employees of the Department of Philosophy of Perm University for the last three decades.

These studies have shown that the nature of man and his intellect must include something important from the mass-energy nature of the physical form of matter, the supra-mass-energy nature of chemism, the adaptive essence of living matter. The essence of the intellect must somehow include the mass-energy principle of the physical, the over-massenergetic principle of direct substrate synthesis of the chemical world, the principle of self-preservation through adaptation to the environment of living matter.

Logical laws and forms of intelligence arose from the “logic” of physical, chemical and biological processes and interactions. In the closest way, these laws are conditioned and prepared by the “axiom” of natural selection, including both the layer of direct random sampling according to the “trial and error” method and the underlying deep tendency of the living to self-development, which eludes modern interpretations of the synthetic theory of evolution.

Prehistory of intelligence

The immediate predecessor of human intelligence is the so-called “concrete thinking”, or thinking “concrete”, sensory images. The nature, structure, and “logic” of concrete thinking is still very poorly understood. It is considered that the psyche of higher animals is based on two main types of reactions – instincts and temporary connections (associations). Instincts are inborn, inherited specific forms of behavior and the reflection of the environment, formed as a result of many thousands of years of biological evolution.

Associations have a lifelong character, are formed in the course of individual adaptation to the environment, constitute the individual lifetime experience of the animal. Associations are a reflection of external relations between various perceived by animals environmental phenomena — sounds, smells, etc.

Instincts and associations, in their complex form, are also part of the human psyche, forming the humanized biological foundation of his consciousness and intellectual activity. The basic, generalizing life (or self-preservation), motor, sexual, cognitive, and cognitive instincts can be attributed to human instincts.

According to the ideas of modern psychophysiology, the mental activity of animals and humans has its own physiological basis or foundation, which is composed primarily of unconditional (inborn, species) and conditional (in vivo) reflexes. The theory of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes, created by I.M. Sechenov, I.P.Pavlov and their numerous followers, revealing the physiological foundation of mental activity, contributed to the search for ways to experimentally study the psyche.

At the same time, some followers of this school created an overly straightforward concept of the mental one, which interpreted the psyche either as a reflex or as a definite (along with the physiological) side of it. This concept radically diverged from the ideas of I.M. Sechenov and I.P. Pavlov, who understood the reflex as a purely physiological phenomenon underlying mental activity.

There were various versions of the concept of the “reflex nature of the psyche” – from the almost complete reduction of the mental to reflexes and physiological to attempts to defend the relative independence and specificity of the mental within the reflex, but they all actually recognized the reflex as the first and initial unit of mental activity and, therefore, intelligence. In developing the concept of the reflex bases of the psyche of animals and man, I.P. Pavlov categorically objected to the explanation of mental phenomena in man conditioned reflexes.

Moreover, I.P.Pavlov believed that, and the mental activity of animals is not a set of conditioned reflexes. In experiments on chimpanzees (Raphael and Rosa), the latter had to solve the problem – to get a banana, suspended from the ceiling of the cage, with the help of several boxes of different sizes. After a certain amount of trial and error, Raphael learned how to make boxes in descending order of their size, i.e. build a stable pyramid.

Describing these experiments, I.P. Pavlov spoke on one of his famous “environments”: “… when a monkey builds its tower to reach the fruit, then this cannot be called a“ conditioned reflex ”. This is the case of the formation of knowledge, the capture of the normal connection of things. This is another case. ”

In apes and, more broadly, higher animals, there is the ability to form a kind of knowledge, “catching the normal connection of things”. How does this kind of reaction or connection in the psyche (association) of animals differ from conditioned reflexes? The classical conditioned reflex is the nervous connection of two points of the cerebral cortex, fixing (reflecting) the connection of some external phenomenon (sound, smell, etc.), acting as an external stimulus indifferent to the organism, with another, which is directly biologically significant for the organism ( food, enemy, etc.).

By itself, indifferent to the organism, a phenomenon that does not have immediate biological significance (for example, a bell), associated with the appearance of food, becomes a signal of food, an unconditioned stimulus, and therefore acquires a biological significance for the organism. Communication of a call with food has the character of a temporary coincidence, i.e. external communication. However, the signal connection has an objective “meaning” for the animal, because it indicates the appearance of food, the enemy, etc.

Therefore, the conditioned reflex is not a kind of simple mechanical connection of completely dissimilar events and can serve as a genetic prerequisite for the formation of more complex psychological connections, meaning the formation of knowledge, the “capture of the normal connection of things”.

In connections of the type named by I.P. Pavlov education knowledge, displayed external, not causal, the essential connection of things. However, these external relations express, “shine through” the necessary, essential connections, for the biological significance of external phenomena is not accidental, essential. The animal thinks in sensual images, not in concepts that are uniquely capable of grasping the essential aspects of reality. However, implicitly, in a hidden and unconscious form, this knowledge reflects the essential aspects of reality. The adaptive mode of existence of the animal determines the direct knowledge of the phenomena, while the essential side of the real phenomena remains hidden.

The essence of life lies in the irremovable tendency of the living to self-preservation, carried out by adaptation, adaptation to the environment. For an adaptive mode of existence, it is necessary and sufficient to display external aspects of reality. Man arises as a result of the natural development of the inner contradiction of life: the absolute in nature tendency of the living to self-preservation “brings” the living beyond the relatively “weak” and limited way of activity — adaptation to the environment — and generates a more efficient and powerful way of activity — transformation of the environment, production of its own existence, peculiar to man as the highest form of matter.

The productive mode of existence necessarily generates a fundamentally new form of thinking — the human intellect, capable of reflecting both the phenomena and the essence of the real world. For human intelligence, the endless world and its own inexhaustible human essence become the subject of reflection. Intellect is endless in nature.

Acting as one of the main (along with labor) attributes or “essential forces” of man, which arose as a result of the infinite evolution of the world, the human intellect becomes related to the infinite in the world and human essence. If the animal’s thinking is “in relation” only to the final part of the external environment, then the human intellect from the moment of its appearance by the most infinite history of its appearance is “open” to infinity, engages in dialogue with the infinite world. In the ability of endless creativity, knowledge and change of the world – the dignity and greatness of the human intellect.

PRIMITIVE INTELLIGENCE

The study of primitive intelligence seems to be even more difficult than its biological history, since the application of experimental methods is hardly possible here. One of the most important indicators of the formation and development of primitive intellect are its main results, which have come down to our time, the fossilized tools of labor of primitive man. The procession of the human mind begins with the first “cosmic” achievement of man – the creation of the first tools of labor, practically and spiritually placing man in relation to an infinite world.

The human mode of existence – the transformation of the surrounding world, the production of conditions of its existence that do not exist in nature – determined the first and most important paradigm of human intelligence – the correspondence of thought to reality, the objectivity of the display of reality. The basic condition for the existence and development of man is the knowledge of the increasingly essential properties and relationships of natural objects, the phenomenological manifestations of the laws of nature, and from a certain, fairly high level of development of society, the laws of nature and society.

Primitive man had to have very extensive observations and knowledge of the system of natural phenomena, their temporal and seasonal sequence, etc. It is necessary to assume that the intellect of this period of development of society possessed the simplest logic, which to some extent reproduced the “logic of things”, the logic of natural connections and regularities, on which human existence directly depended.

In the process of folding this “logic of things” in the logic of intellect, obviously, four basic formal-logical laws — identities, contradictions, and the excluded third, sufficient reason — were gradually taking shape. However, by themselves, these laws are inherent only in a sufficiently developed, mature intellect and it is difficult to establish the time of their final formation in the human intellect. Probably, this should be attributed only to the period of ancient intelligence.

It is natural to assume that at a certain, relatively high level of development of primitive labor and intellect, the task of explaining the system of natural phenomena becomes a man, with which the emergence of a new level of intellect — the explanatory — should be attributed. The emergence of this level was pushed by the active practical nature of man, since the producing activity of man, or labor, is causal activity, which inevitably generates causal intelligence, that is, explaining intelligence.

The famous explorer of primitive intellect, Levi-Bruhl (1857-1939), distinguished individual and collective intelligence. He believed that individual intelligence was based on the general laws of formal logic, because otherwise a person could not survive in the struggle for existence. However, the collective intellect was of an oologic (prelogical) character. It was based on the law of participation (participation), according to which the primitive man believed that the perceived object could be in different places at the same time, the image of the object was identical to the object itself (therefore, impact on the image of the animal entails future success in the hunt), etc.

Pre-logical thinking, according to Levi-Bruhl, was embodied in collective rites and myths. The concept of logical thinking has been seriously criticized in Soviet and foreign science. And at the end of his life, its author was not inclined to excessively uphold the pre-logical nature of primitive thinking.

It seems to us that in the field of the display of the direct typical properties and relationships of natural phenomena, primitive thinking was logical rather than a dologic one. However, one should not overestimate the logical nature of primitive thinking and thereby transform the laws of logic into an too light and precocious gift of human thought. Logical thinking could not be formed immediately, it had to go through a series of stages, starting with the stage of immature, not established logical thinking, which could hardly be based on “clearly defined”, ready laws of identity, contradiction, excluded third, sufficient reason. It seems that primitive thinking was rather based on a repetitive “logic of things”, i.e. stable, regular connections of natural phenomena. In the depths of this logic formal logical laws were actually formed.

It is necessary to distinguish, further, the “layer” of thinking associated with the totality of observed repetitive phenomena of nature, and the “explanatory” layer, within which the folding of formal logic took place in a particularly complex way. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between the processes of logization of the immediate, concrete level of thinking and explanatory thinking. “Pre-logical thinking” Levy-Bruhl clearly belonged to the last level. In the thinking of primitive man, two basic paradigms, or types of intellect, arise – realistic and illusory, fantastic. The first was to understand things as they are in themselves, in their explanation “from themselves,” without any extraneous additions.

This paradigm had a powerful biological basis, for the adaptive lifestyle of an animal implies an adequate reflection of the external environment. The paradigm of realism received even stronger grounds with the emergence of a social way of life, because the transformation of the natural environment, the production of one’s own life, even more than an adaptive way of life, requires an adequacy of reflection, without which a “second nature” cannot be created. The realistic paradigm runs through the whole history of mankind and defines all the achievements of the human intellect. At a certain stage of development, it gets its philosophical expression mainly in the form of materialism, raising this paradigm to the level of high and productive abstraction.

Certain elements of a realistic paradigm inevitably arose within the limits of idealistic concepts, causing all those real realistic achievements that in essence turned out to be materialistic in content. These include, for example, all the rational content of the idealistic dialectic of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and especially Hegel.

The second, competing, paradigm of human intelligence is associated with the only possible alternative to a realistic paradigm – the unconscious transfer of human qualities to natural phenomena, first of all, the ability of thinking and conscious action. The emergence of the anthropomorphic paradigm with the emergence of a layer of explanatory thinking was a necessary and inevitable step of human intelligence. The phenomena of nature, their orderliness, and the natural sequence could be explained by primitive man only by the model and likeness of his own conscious behavior. The activity of nature received the character of deliberate actions, which were attributed to spirits, spiritual beings.

The nature and structure of the human psyche are such that their own conscious actions at the very earliest stages of human development become the subject of direct observation and awareness. In the active nature of man and his psyche laid the prerequisites of the initial explanation of natural phenomena modeled on the conscious human actions. This premise is easily detected in the psychology of a child who, at a certain age, ascribes good and bad intentions to things. Since for primitive man, conscious action appeared as something natural and ordinary, it was easier to explain natural phenomena with consciousness, will, and intentions.

Historically, the first holistic form or type of explanatory intelligence is myth. The myth is an attempt to create a fantastic explanation of the world around us and the life of society. He acts as a predecessor or a primitive version of the worldview. Myths have the character of narration about the events of the past or the future, about the origin of the world, gods, animals, people (cosmogonic myths), tribes (ethnographic), the cycle of seasons, weather phenomena, acts of heroes, etc.

In most cosmogonic myths, the world is considered as having arisen from the initial chaos from which the earth, the sky, the underworld, the gods creating people, emerged. These myths clearly contain elements of realism, elemental materialism, since the gods are the result of the natural process of the emergence of order from chaos. However, the rest of the mythology is dominated by the activities of gods, fantastic creatures, animals, endowed with human traits. The anthropomorphic paradigm forms the basis of the mythological type of thinking.

Myths included the first primitive abstractions of chaos, order, earth, sky, people, gods, animals, etc. They contained the beginnings of later abstractions of law and law (the emergence of order from chaos), matter, gods, etc. However, in the myth everything is clothed in the form of images. Myths contain certain regulations governing the behavior of people, certain social prohibitions, which act as regulators of social life.

The fundamental feature of the mythological type of intellect is that the world appears in the myths as one-dimensional, as a sequence of events or phenomena behind which no essential world is hidden. Mythological thinking does not distinguish between being and essential worlds. Gods, spirits, animals act as actors in the same unfolding history of the world.

The mythological type of intellect was closely connected with the ritual aspect of the life of primitive society. An important component of mythological thinking was magical thinking, based not on the knowledge of real causal connections, but on the said principle of participation.

With the mythological type of intellect, a phenomenon first appears that has passed through the entire history of mankind to the present day, expressing both the strength and the weakness of the intellect: fictitious realities (gods, spirits, etc.) for a long time acquire the role of a substitute real, objective reality and even become higher than the last. For a long time, myths served as one of the most important regulators of public life, conditioned collective feelings and mindsets, among which the main role was played by the fear of the mysterious forces of the world.

The transformation of fiction into a seemingly real reality was well described by Vaipuldanya, one of the few “civilized” Aboriginal people of Australia. According to his testimony, the magic actions of the sorcerers had quite real consequences, for example, the death of a member of the tribe “inveterate” by the sorcerer, even if the latter did not know about his “funeral”. Absolute belief in the supernatural capabilities of the sorcerer, fear, hypnotic suggestion (including suggestion at a distance) turned mystical fiction into a real factor of human life.

The mythological type of intellect entered the next, higher form of intellect — the religious type of intellect. In addition, it has been preserved in a relatively independent form, albeit in new forms, in the structure of the intellect of modern man. These include, for example, the tragic consequences of the fascist myth of the superiority of the “Nordic race”, which subdued to its influence a significant part of the German population in the 1930s-1940s. The myth of the eternity of capitalism, widely undermined in the ideas of modern humanity, was widespread.

The myth of the eternity of private property is widespread, which supposedly arises from the very nature of human individuals, and not from the content and nature of social labor and technology. In recent years, due to a number of reasons, the “market myth” has come into use in our country, also noticeably destroyed by the experience of the developed capitalist countries, by the experience of building socialism in the USSR.

Religion is more complex than the mythology, the phenomenon of the spiritual life of society. It includes a system of ideas about supernatural forces – gods. The religion that emerged 40-50 thousand years ago originally differs little from mythology, incorporates a significant part of the myths that correspond to the prevailing creed. The presence of increasingly complex creeds, i.e. belief systems that are becoming increasingly abstract in nature are one of the most important differences of religion from myth. At the same time, religion always preserves in many respects a figurative character, expresses a creed in a figurative form, making it accessible to all segments of society.

A characteristic feature of religion is the cult of the gods and, therefore, a developed ceremonial side, borrowing much of magical thinking and action. Religion is also associated with a special social institution – the church.

Religion appears as a more developed than mythology form of thinking based on the paradigm of a fantastic explanation, or the anthropomorphic paradigm. Explanation of the world on the model and likeness of man and conscious human action acquires in religion, especially in its developed forms of ancient and feudal time, the most obvious and ultimate character. In the center of religious dogma there are gods or a single god, possessing traits that represent the hypertrophied properties of a person – reason, will, mercy, etc. The anthropomorphism of religion was noticed by thinkers from the ancient philosopher Xenophanes to the nineteenth-century philosopher. L. Feuerbach.

In religious thinking, more than in myth, an explanatory side is presented, but this explanation has as its limit the concept of God, the emergence of which (concepts) remains for religious intelligence inherently an insoluble matter. The ultimate logical basis of a religious explanation is not the laws of logic, but the paradigm of anthropomorphism, surrounded by a layer of logical fog. The true ultimate basis of religious intelligence is not logic and reason, but faith.

The explanatory layer of religious intelligence takes on a noticeable appearance only with the emergence of philosophy, i.e. in ancient and medieval times. The leading role in this regard was played by the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.

In the religious intellect of the primitive period of development, only the distinction between being and essential worlds was outlined, which becomes distinct with the emergence of philosophy.

The general nature of ancient intelligence

The development of human labor associated with the complication of its external means – tools, the growth of labor productivity and, consequently, the material power of humanity, its independence from the blind forces of nature cause the transition of human intelligence to a qualitatively higher stage of development – the stage of ancient intelligence. A direct expression of the development of the ability to work, a new stage of development of nature was the transition to metal – copper, bronze, iron tools of labor, which caused a significant increase in labor productivity.

The growth of labor productivity led to a significant increase in the surplus product, which made it possible and necessary for it to be appropriated as part of society, i.e. the division of society into opposing classes: slaves and slave owners. It also meant the emergence of a division of labor on the physical and mental, the most significant division of labor, which determined the nature of social development up to our days.

The emergence of a slave-owning society is also associated with the emergence of the opposite of city and village.

The division of labor into mental and physical led to the emergence of a social group of people whose main form of activity is mental labor. The emergence of cities meant the concentration of material and spiritual culture in large centers. These social factors, along with the immediate needs of the development of production, transformation of nature led to a powerful advancement of human intelligence.

The most important features of a new historical type of intelligence are a deeper understanding of natural things and man himself, the distinction between being and essential worlds, the emergence of reflective thinking, a sharp separation of the two main paradigms of thinking, the development of explanatory thinking, an intensive process of logization of thinking.

One of the most significant expressions of these intellectual acquisitions is the emergence of philosophy as a form of social consciousness, as the highest “layer” of thinking, a concentrated expression of the spiritual, intellectual culture of society.

The division of the world into the essential and which was the first greatest discovery of the human mind, determined all its further development. It is comparable, probably, with the invention of fire in the field of practical mastering of the world. If in mythology the picture of the world looks one-dimensional and one-dimensional, this is a chain of events in which gods, mythical creatures, heroes, people, animals act, and there is no hidden and more solid world behind this chain, if in primitive religion the distinction between the obvious and the hidden the world of mysterious forces, then in ancient philosophy the distinction between being and essential worlds becomes the most important principle, expressed in the phenomenon and essence becoming abstractions, gives rise to a complex sequence of other abstractions: being, mat ble and perfect, motion and rest, chance and necessity of causality, etc.

Comprehending the essential world, human thought, which reached a higher degree of generalization and abstraction, had to split in accordance with two opposite paradigms – realistic and anthropomorphic – into two opposite ways of explaining the world – materialistic and idealistic. Materialism is an explanation of the world from itself, idealism is the transfer to the material world of human qualities, first of all the abilities of consciousness, of conscious actions.

The paradigms of realism (objectivity) and anthropomorphism have a significantly different character and explanatory potential. The first paradigm in the trend, in principle, is associated with the achievement of real knowledge, reflecting the real world, as it is in itself. This paradigm causes a consistent deepening of objective knowledge about the world. It is also in a positive relationship with practice, contributes to the success of practical activities and is itself due to the real practical achievements of society, the development of material production. It has long been noticed, therefore, that in their immediate practical activity, all are materialists. The application in practice of idealistic and religious ideas inevitably leads to mistakes.

However, the paradigm of realism, objectivity does not act automatically. Due to the complexity of the process of cognition, the attainment of real knowledge is always accompanied by mistakes and delusions. Cognition always has a historical character, a historical measure of truth and error, peculiar to the historical type of intellect.

The anthropomorphic, or fantastic, paradigm of knowledge in a tendency leads to an erroneous, far from reality, explanation. Its connection with knowledge and practice is in principle negative. The history of knowledge shows that attempts to reconcile the results of applying this paradigm with reality give rise to over-complicated, artificial constructions. It is noteworthy that this overlap is not due to the great creative potential of the fantastic paradigm, but, on the contrary, to its simplicity in comparison with the realism paradigm. The explanation of things according to the model and likeness of conscious human actions is incomparably simpler than their explanation from themselves, on the basis of the paradigm of objectivity.

The nature of man as a creature, whose daily life directly depends on his conscious actions, is such that a man learns much earlier about his ability to act consciously than about more or less complex properties of natural things. The causal nature of conscious human action becomes clear to man before he learns the real causes of natural phenomena. Of course, at the initial stages of development, a person does not yet understand the underlying mechanisms of his conscious actions, but he already knows about his ability to cause significant changes in things.

Where a realistic paradigm encounters difficulties caused by the complexity of objects, the limited material resources of their knowledge, the philosopher who thinks by the anthropomorphic paradigm can always find an artificial solution that replaces real knowledge with anthropomorphic fiction. It is not by chance that the grandiose system of categories of Hegel’s philosophy has so far not been surpassed in a certain sense by the scientific philosophy, which does not have an equally developed system of categories. Where Hegel clearly lacked real knowledge, he replaced real connections with all sorts of stretchings and purely verbal transitions.

The emergence of a historical type of intelligence based on the anthropomorphic paradigm is a natural and inevitable alternative to a realistic paradigm. Being erroneous in its essence, it does not exclude the spontaneous display of the actual properties of natural things and of man himself. The pressure of life actually led to the fact that the real life content intruded into philosophical, religious, etc. anthropomorphic constructions contrary to the adopted basic installation. The history of human knowledge suggests that idealistic and religious systems included certain realistic aspects that were included in the foundation of world spiritual culture.

Moreover, at the pre-scientific levels of the development of the intellect, some essential elements of knowledge could not be obtained within the framework of the previous historical forms of the realistic paradigm and, on the contrary, could be acquired within the framework of idealistic approaches to the extent that these approaches included elements of realism. A classic example of this is Hegel’s dialectic, which, in its highest form before the emergence of scientific philosophy, “guessed” the real dialectic of the world. Hegel’s dialectic stood above the corresponding ideas of the materialists of the XVII-XVIII centuries, the ideas of the materialist XIX century. Feuerbach. It should be noted, however, that these positive results were not generated by a fantastic paradigm as such, but by the elements of a realistic paradigm included in it.

Deepening into the essential world led to the emergence of another fundamental feature of the intellect — reflexivity, i.e. the ability to think not only about external reality, but about the thought itself. Since ancient times, self-reflection, self-reflection becomes a necessary and powerful means of developing intelligence. The study of more and more complex aspects of reality is impossible without the simultaneous improvement of the intellect, which is accomplished through the comprehension of oneself. Each level of the essential world generates an appropriate level or turn of reflection, raising the intellect to a new stage of development.

The ability to reflect lies in the very nature of the intellect; however, it gains noticeable development only with the appearance of ancient intellect. In principle, reflection does not contain any of its limitations: each achievement of thought reflected in oneself can be subjected to reflection, which in turn is subject to new reflection, etc. The infinite nature of man and his intellect, the openness of the human intellect of infinity, correlation with the infinite world are expressed in an infinite sequence of overlapping steps of reflection, thanks to which thought is capable of infinite progress.

In the ability to self-reflection lies the criticality of thought, its critical attitude to the world and to itself.

Reflection becomes, further, an indispensable tool for the formation of logic, a tool for the logization of thought. The final formation of the logical nature of intelligence, the formation of its logical structures and laws could occur in the ancient world only through self-reflection. The history of ancient and medieval intellect convincingly testifies to this.

The distinction between the essential and the worlds, the deepening into the essential reality marked the beginning of the formation of the basic scale of human intelligence, which took shape with the introduction of a sequence of other important categories of philosophy. This is due to the emergence of a set of major problems of human cognition, the solution of which is within the competence of philosophy as a new form of social consciousness.

These problems are primarily two of the most important issues of philosophy. The first and main one is the so-called fundamental question of philosophy, the question of the relation of consciousness to matter.

The main question of philosophy has a complex structure. In its composition can distinguish three levels.

The first level of the basic question of philosophy has two sides: the question of what is primary – matter or consciousness, and the question of whether the world is knowable. Depending on the solution of the first side of the issue, philosophical thought is divided into two main trends, or two broad concepts, materialism and idealism. The solution of the second side of this level of the basic question of philosophy gives either an acknowledgment of the knowability of the world, or its negation – agnosticism.

The second level of the basic question of philosophy is a triple question composed of three questions: about the essence of the world, the essence of consciousness, the essence of the relation of consciousness to the world.

The third level removes the ultimate abstractness of the preceding formulations and introduces the holistic concept of man in his relation to the infinite world: this is a question about the essence of the world, the essence of man, his place in the world, essence and the meaning of his existence.

The second major question of philosophy, after the main question, is the question of development, the solution of which led to the emergence of two main points of view or concepts — dialectics and metaphysics. The division into dialectics and metaphysics is not the main watershed in philosophy, it is subordinated to the division of philosophical currents depending on the solution of the main issue of philosophy.

Since its inception, the most important questions of philosophy have taken various historical forms and various decisions related to historical types of intelligence.

The emergence of philosophical problematics in the human intellect determined the broadest bounds of human cognition, expanded to the extreme limits the scope of the application of the intellect, created the basis for the emergence of the private sciences, revealing their place in the knowledge system. Philosophy stands at the very beginning of the formation of human intelligence. The system of categories of philosophy, evolving in the process of the development of knowledge, constituted the invisible framework of human knowledge.

Without its main landmarks – the concepts of the world and man, material and ideal, finite and infinite, phenomenon and essence, law and regularity, cause and effect – human knowledge becomes amorphous and is deprived of inner meaning. Knowledge of things is possible only “in the frame of reference,” compiled by philosophical categories that form the basic framework of human intelligence, on which the concepts of the special sciences and ordinary consciousness are superimposed.

Features of the process of logization of ancient intelligence

It is noteworthy that, without having yet created natural science, not a single natural science theory that retained its value to the present days (except, however, to a certain extent, Euclidean geometry), ancient thinkers created a theory of formal logic, the main content of which has not lost its meaning until our time. Dealing with relatively simple phenomena of nature and social life, ancient philosophers discovered the basic laws and forms of thinking.

The first formal logical law of thinking – the law of identity – was formulated by Parmenides. The law of sufficient reason as an empirical law of thought is described by the Democrat.

The forefather of logic as a detailed teaching is Aristotle. In a collection of treatises on logic (called his Organon by his followers), Aristotle regarded logic essentially as an auxiliary scientific discipline, like rhetoric, or, as the name Organon can be translated, an instrument of thought. For Aristotle, the laws of thinking are natural laws that have a generally binding character. Aristotle analyzed in detail only two of the four basic laws of logic — contradiction and the excluded one.

The other two are identities and sufficient grounds, already known to predecessors, he has only been identified. It should be noted that the preference given to the laws of contradiction and the excluded third was due to the situation that arose in ancient philosophy, associated with the controversy between the metaphysical philosophers and the dialectician Heraclitus. If the former defended the law of identity (the thing is always identical with itself), then the latter undoubtedly put forward a deeper idea of ​​the contradiction of being, its non-identity with itself. In the interpretation of Parmenides, the law of identity, fair in itself only within certain limits (the definiteness of a thing as an object of thought), received an overly broad and erroneous meaning – the absolute identity of the thing to itself, the absolute stillness of being.

In the statement of Heraclitus “it is impossible to enter the same river twice”, just as correct only up to a certain limit, contained an element of relativism, fraught with destructive consequences for the thought that later manifested itself in Kratyl’s ideas (“you cannot enter the same river once”) and Sophists.

In the confrontation of these extreme approaches, Aristotle was able to detect formal logical principles (laws) of thinking, which develop and supplement the laws of identity and sufficient reason. However, Aristotle could not further develop the logic inherent in the dialectical principle “everything flows”, formulated by Heraclitus. This logic, however, was a deeper layer of thinking that went beyond the limits of formal logic itself.

Aristotle’s logical system contained the doctrine of categories (the philosopher singled out ten main categories), definitions of concepts, judgments, conclusions (mainly the doctrine of syllogisms), evidence, analysis of sophisms, etc.

A remarkable aspect of the process of the logization of ancient intelligence is the great interest in the paradoxes of thought. The idea was to go through the school of mental paradoxes. Although the practice of paradoxes was often reduced (for example, among sophists) to not very serious mental experiments, the formulation and search for ways to overcome paradoxes were absolutely necessary for the formation of reflective and explanatory intelligence, ultimately – for solving the most common, worldview, questions – the essence of the world, development, human.

Paradox is a form of thought in which two mutually exclusive statements are combined, but having equally necessary grounds. Such, for example, are the assertions about the finiteness and infinity of the world, if they are regarded as equally valid (the first antinomy of I. Kant). The paradox can be in the form of sophistry, in which mutually exclusive statements can be presented in a hidden, verbally not dismembered form. Such, for example, is the sophistry of “I lie”.

All categories of philosophy and private sciences arise through the resolution of the corresponding paradoxes, which can be represented in a hidden, non-expanded form. The solution of the largest problems of philosophy is mediated by the formulation and resolution of certain paradoxes. The resolution of the relevant paradoxes is one of the most important criteria of scientific philosophy, scientific intelligence in general.

The paradoxes expressed in the aporias of Zeno played a large role in the development of human intellect, the emergence of the dialectical mode of thinking.

In the V century. BC. the school of sophists (Gorgiy, Protagoras, Prodik, and others) brings to an absurdity the element of relativism inherent in the ideas of Heraclitus. This is clearly expressed, for example, in the sophistries of the “changing man”: he who borrowed now owes nothing, since he has become different; Invited yesterday for lunch comes today uninvited, as he is a different person. With all the naivety of such reasoning, sophisms allowed for a deeper understanding of the dialectical nature of being and its mental representations. Sophisms were not an empty “mind game”, they expressed surprise before the “weirdness” of thought and were associated with the childhood of evolving explanatory intelligence.

In the IV. BC. The Megar school (Diodorus Kronos, Philo, Evbulid, and others) went further than the sophists by formulating a number of paradoxes that retained their serious meaning even today: the “liar”, “heap”, “covered” paradoxes, etc. The “liar” paradox in the wording Evbulid consists in the statement: “The statement that I am saying now is false.”

It is easy to see that if we consider this statement true, then it turns out to be false, which makes it true, and so on to infinity. The “liar” paradox reveals the remarkable and unique ability of thought to self-reversal, which leads to the “bad infinity” of a repetitive and fruitless circle of reasoning. The Megarians did not attach much importance to this evil infinity, which the skeptics, however, did.

Skeptics Pyrrho, Timon, Carnead, Enesidem and others (4th-2nd centuries BC) denied the possibility of reliable knowledge, arguing that every logical proof leads to regression to infinity and becomes impossible. Skeptics considered every interpretation from two sides, formulating a thesis and an antithesis and further sought to show that neither one nor the other could be considered wealthy. In this way, they analyzed, for example, the problem of causality. Recognition of causality, from the point of view of Enesidem, is impossible, as is its denial.

Does the cause occur earlier or simultaneously with the action? Both this statement leads to absurdity. The cause cannot be before the action, since then it would remain without action and was not the cause, but the reason cannot be after the action. Cause and action cannot be simultaneous either, for then they would be indistinguishable. Skeptics came to the very strong conclusion that no real process could be started, could not be caused, or, otherwise, nothing could be started.

MEDIEVAL INTELLIGENCE

In feudal society with its two main classes — feudal lords and peasants dependent on them, other social strata (artisans, merchants), rigid class division and estate hierarchy, only religion could become the main form of awareness of the world and itself, the ideological defense of the social system. The period of feudalism is therefore characterized by the undivided dominance of religion and the church in the spiritual life of society. Materialism, as a system of philosophical views, disappears for a very long time — in Western Europe for about a thousand years — a period. The Middle Ages knows only one way of thinking, one philosophy – the religious one, which it turns into a “handmaid of theology,” or theology.

Feudalism is the first and only social system in history that ideologically fully relied on the idea of ​​God, tried to build its spiritual life, to understand the world and the meaning of human existence solely on religious foundations. By a fair assessment of Marx, under feudalism, religion serves as the “… most general synthesis and the most general sanction” of social life.

Religious influence and control of the church penetrated deep into everyday social and personal life, often acquiring the most severe forms (crusades, inquisition). The medieval religious way of thinking is guilty of numerous victims of religious wars and inquisitions.

Feudalism was a kind of “breakdown of history” to build human existence on the principles of religion and idealism.

The dominant position in the philosophy of feudalism was occupied by scholasticism, who considered reason, logical reasoning, and not mystical contemplation and feeling as the way of comprehending God.

The goal of the “handmaiden of theology” is the philosophical substantiation and systematization of Christian dogma. A characteristic feature of the scholastic mode of thinking was blind faith in indisputable “authorities”. Therefore, the requirement of a rational understanding of Christian doctrine did not go beyond the boundaries of certain dogmas introduced by “authorities” and set insurmountable limits for the consistent application of the requirements of logic. Sources of scholasticism – the teachings of Plato, as well as the ideas of Aristotle (from which all materialistic content was eliminated), the Bible, the writings of the “fathers of the church.”

The largest ideologue of scholasticism was Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). His main points of view are set out in Summa Theologia and Sum Sum Against Pagans, constructed in the form of a dismembered system of questions to which categorical answers were given. Developing the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas considered God as a “pure form,” the root cause and ultimate goal of all that exists. An important place in his views is occupied by the doctrine of the divine creation of the world, the further development of the concept of hilomorphism. From the standpoint of the scholastic, things are the essence of the unity of matter and form. At the same time, matter is the result of divine creation, it is only the “pure possibility” of things. Things become things only because of the form, the source of which is the divine essence, the “pure form.”

Scholasticism brings the anthropomorphic, fantastic paradigm of thinking to the limit, essentially exhausting its basic capabilities. Considering God as an absolute being, “pure form”, as infinite reason and all-perfection, scholasticism sharpens the inner insoluble contradiction (paradox) of the concept of God. This was revealed especially in the development of “evidence of the existence of God.”

One of the most important “proofs of the existence of God” – ontological – in various versions was put forward by Augustine the Blessed (354-430) and Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). Its meaning is to conclude about the existence of God on the grounds that we think of him: God is thought of as an all-perfect being, but it is impossible to think of all-perfect, not thinking of his being, therefore, God exists. In other words, if you remove the scholastic phraseology: if we think that there is a god, then it is. It is easy to understand that “ontological proof” is a vicious circle in which the existence of God is not proved, but has already been admitted; it is proved that in a hidden form has already been allowed.

Conclusion from thought to reality (if I think it, it means it exists) was introduced by Parmenides and used further by Plato. It is associated with a naive idea of ​​thought, the very fact of whose appearance is supposed to be evidence of its correctness. In everyday consciousness, this argument has survived to this day and serves as perhaps the most important “proof” of the existence of God for most believers who are not experienced in logic or in science in general: I believed, therefore, God exists. The clarification of the logical inconsistency of the “ontological argument”, the gradual disappearance (to a certain extent) of the logical fog, which always clothed the basic concept of God as an absolute and infinite prime mover, began already in medieval intelligence.

In Catholicism, Thomas Aquinas is considered to be a great logistician who gave a rigorous logical development of theology. Thomas Aquinas formulated five “proofs of the existence of God”, beyond which modern religious philosophy in essence did not go. Aquinas were astute enough to reject ontological evidence. Five proofs formulated by him can be reduced to two main ones – cosmological and teleological. The essence of the first of these lies in the fact that from the indisputable thought that every thing has its own reason, and every reason its own reason, it is concluded that there must be some last reason for all that exists, which is God.

In the “cosmological proof”, therefore, the conclusion about the latter reason does not follow anywhere, is arbitrary, biased. It does not follow from anywhere that the sequence of things or events should not be infinite.

The “teleological evidence” is based on the statement of the indisputable fact that there is a relationship between natural phenomena, a kind of “expediency”. Thus, the existence of animals depends on the plant world, the latter – on climate and other conditions, etc. From the fact of such orderliness and “consistency” of the phenomena of nature, the theologian concludes that there must exist a creator who has created an expedient connection of natural phenomena.

Again, the basis of teleological evidence is the prejudice that natural, material phenomena themselves cannot have any orderliness, consistency, regularity, that the latter can only be explained by the existence of an active form, intention, purpose, creator. The entire history of the development of natural science is the history of the consistent refutation of the prejudiced anthromorphic postulate of passive and amorphous matter and the activity introduced into it by the world mind.

In all the “proofs of the existence of God,” the preconceived and unreasonable concept of God is surrounded by a dense logical, more precisely, alogical, fog.

Thomas Aquinas divided all the tenets of faith into those reasonably comprehensible by man (God exists, God is one, the human soul is immortal, etc.) and reasonably incomprehensible, which must be taken on faith, for they are overreasonable and inaccessible to the human mind. Aquinat referred to the latter primarily the dogma of the creation of the world. Characteristically, such a dogma turned out to be mentally incomprehensible, in which the contradictions of the original and fundamental concept, God, manifested themselves to the greatest extent. The explanation of the creation of things by a motionless in its essence is fundamentally impossible, it is really “super-rational”, since it is a false thought that contradicts itself.

The root feature of medieval intelligence, which distinguishes it from all other historical forms of the mind, is the rejection of the natural-science explanation. The final explanation of natural and social phenomena could serve, in accordance with the original religious concept of God as the creator of all things, only divine providence. This inevitably followed the practice of mercilessly destroying even the weak manifestations of the realistic paradigm, expressed especially in the burning of thousands of dissidents by the Inquisition, the burning of the first great scientists – M. Servet and D. Bruno. It is known that in one of the small cities of Western Europe, most of the female population was burned on charges of witchcraft. The fantastic and anthropomorphic paradigm brought to the highest expression was the source of monstrously cruel practices.

However, one should not think that the period of the Middle Ages represents a complete failure in the history of the development of human intelligence. With all the major losses associated with the elimination of the realistic paradigm, some progress was made in the depths of the medieval intellect. The achievement of medieval intelligence was the fundamental exhaustion of the anthropomorphic paradigm in its religious form, which prepared the later flowering of the natural-science and philosophical-materialistic thinking. Within the framework of the theological system of concepts, formal logic was refined, and such major philosophical problems as the problem of infinity were discussed in a peculiar form.

Trying to fully describe God as an all-perfect infinite creature, medieval scholastics inevitably encountered paradoxes of infinity. The concept of God’s all perfection actually hid the notion of infinity. Indicative in this connection is the “paradox of the omnipotence of God”, expressed in the form of one of the problems discussed by the scholastics: “Can an almighty god create such a stone that he cannot lift?” – If God is all-powerful, then he can, therefore, create such a stone who can not lift; but if God is almighty, then he will be able to lift a stone. In scholastic reasoning, the far from trivial problem of the contradiction of infinity, which is always “more than itself”, clearly shines through.

INTELLIGENCE OF THE ERA OF REVIVAL

The Renaissance (XIV-XVI centuries) is characterized by an ever more intensive development of the new, bourgeois way of life. New productive forces and production relations needed the intellect of a new type. This type of intelligence should be based on a new, realistic paradigm. The Renaissance is, therefore, the era of the revival of the realistic paradigm in some of its transitional forms that do not break completely with medieval thinking.

The realistic paradigm of the new intellect has found three of its most vivid expressions: in natural science, humanistic culture, and pantheistic philosophy.

The emergence of natural science in the modern sense of the word is usually associated with the second half of the 15th century. It is due to the fact that new productive forces could not develop only on the basis of the empirical experience of people, they needed the development of mechanics, mathematics, more and more complex branches of physics and chemistry. The heliocentric system of N. Copernicus (1473-1543) was the greatest achievement of the natural sciences of this epoch, which undermined the religious conception of man as the center of the created world, and constituted the whole revolution in natural science, called Copernican. The Copernican system was the first major step in becoming a scientific way of explaining nature from itself, and not from the artificial and biased dogmas of religion.

The Renaissance epoch in the countries of Western Europe gave rise to the greatest rise of art (Dante, Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Bruegel, Durer, etc.). Although this art made extensive use of mythological and religious themes, it was filled with deep earthly humanistic content and placed the center of attention of a living physical and spiritual person. The culture of the Renaissance wore a bright anti-feudal character.

In philosophy, the revival of the realistic paradigm began with the emergence of pantheism as a form of thinking transitioning from idealism and religion to materialism. From the point of view of pantheism, God is not a kind of absolutely independently existing, God is spilled in nature, nature is God. One of the most important ideas of pantheism is the unity of form and nature, the return of a form that was once cut off from Plato from matter and believed to be primary, into the material, material world.

One of the greatest pantheistic philosophers, Nikolai Kuzansky (1401-1464), argued that nature is infinite and the earth is not the center of the world. Human cognition, from his point of view, is achieved on the basis of sensory experience (including experiment), and not by scholastic reasoning. In the philosophy of Kuzansky, elements of the dialectical mode of thinking emerge, primarily the doctrine of “coincidence of opposites,” which the philosopher substantiated mainly on the basis of mathematics. Thus, at infinity, a polygon is identified and a circle (an infinite polygon tends to a circle), the smallest and largest, since each of them is not finite, but leads to infinity, etc.

Cusa considered, however, that the coincidence of opposites is perceived by man not in a logical, but in an intuitive way. The rudiments of dialectics in Kuzants have not yet received a completely rational form. The task of further developing the realistic paradigm was to understand the logical nature of realistic and dialectical thinking.

Deep materialistic content had the philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), based on the teachings of Copernicus. Bruno strongly opposed the principle of the subordination of reason to faith, considered unacceptable the idea of ​​the “duality of truth”, i.e. recognition of the existence of religious and scientific “truths”. He believed that the right to existence has only scientific truth, based on scientific experience. Bruno thus defended the paradigm of realistic thinking with complete certainty.

According to Bruno, the material Universe is one and infinite. The solar system is one of an infinite number of worlds. Bruno went further than Copernicus, who considered the Universe finite. Bruno considered the Universe as a single material, but animate substance. Substance combines the cause and the beginning of things, is active, including the form. Substance has a “soul”, manifested in the “universal mind of the world.” The forms of things are their “souls”. However, Bruno clarified that all things are animated only in possibility, only some natural creatures have actual animation.

The idea of ​​universal animation, which is the source of the activity of matter, is associated with elements of dialectics in the views of Bruno, above all the idea of ​​“coincidence of opposites”.

In 1600, D. Bruno was burned by a church in Rome in the Square of Flowers. Such was the price paid for the rebirth of the intellect. A very characteristic feature of the realistic paradigm is its humanistic orientation and essence. Realism, truth correspond to the real human nature and are a deep source of humanistic ideas, humanistic culture and practice.

INTELLECT XVII-XVIII centuries.

XVII-XVIII centuries. – the period of final approval of the capitalist socio-economic formation, which was fixed by bourgeois revolutions in England (1642-1649) and France (1789-1794). The adoption of new productive forces and production relations led to the formation of natural science and a new worldview. In the XVII century, according to the evaluation of a major researcher of the history of science, D. Bernal, the formation of experimental science is completed. The two most important achievements of natural science of the XVII century. were the mechanics of I. Newton – the first holistic natural science theory relating to a wide field of nature – and the progress of mathematics, first of all the emergence of the theory of infinitely small quantities, or, in Newton’s terminology, differential calculus, whose creators were Newton and Leibnitz.

Evaluating the importance of the main work of Newton “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (1686), Bernal wrote: “By persuasiveness of argumentation, supported by physical evidence, this book has no equal in the whole history of science. Mathematically, it can be compared only with the “Elements” of Euclid, and in terms of the depth of physical analysis and the influence on the ideas of that time – only with the “Origin of Species” of Darwin. She immediately became the bible of a new science, not so much as a reverently honored source of dogma, although the known danger of this existed, especially in England, but as a source of expansion of the methods outlined in it. ” A very important feature of Newton’s theory was the widespread use of methods of quantitative, mathematical physics.

Newton’s theory completed the transformation of the former, Aristotelian, picture of the world, which was started by Copernicus. In place of the concept of celestial spheres, controlled by angels and God as a prime mover, Newton put the concept of a mechanism that operates on the basis of natural laws.

Science XVII century. already possessed its defining unity, in which Bernal distinguishes three sides: the unity of persons (which consisted in the fact that the scientist of that time was able to cover all branches of the well-known science); the presence of a unified guideline and method, which was presented by mathematics; huge interest in the most important technical problems of the time. Science XVII century. largely prepared the industrial revolution of the XVIII century. (in the terminology of Marx and Toynbee).

Formation of science in the XVII century., Its further strengthening and development in the XVIII century. meant the unconditional victory of the realistic, materialistic intellectual paradigm of explaining nature from itself. Religious explanation was decisively removed from the knowledge of nature. “… It is time the rule of theology over science has passed.

Theology could still pervert and delay the progress of science, but could not stop it. By tacit agreement, religion was limited to the moral and spiritual realm. In the realm of the material world, whether they wanted it or not, the scientific revolution was finally accomplished. ” In turn, scientists, as it were, pledged not to violate the boundaries of the sphere of action of religion – the world of human life, with its aspirations and duties, until the XIX century This silent prohibition was not overthrown by Charles Darwin.

The third major achievement of science of the XVII — XVIII centuries. connected with the social sphere. It consisted in the creation of one of the most important concepts of the new time, which retained essential importance up to now, the labor theory of value by W. Petty and A. Smith. W. Petty was the first to put forward the idea that the basis of exchange value is the amount of labor expended. In the Treatise on Taxes and Fees (1667) he wrote that labor is the father of wealth, the earth is his mother.

A comprehensive theory of labor value was developed in the XVIII century. A. Smith in the Study on the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Evaluating labor as a source of material wealth, Smith made a significant step towards materialism in interpreting social phenomena, since he actually identified the main material factor in the development of society, although he did not yet provide an adequate interpretation of it. Smith explained commodity-money relations inherent in the nature of individuals “tendency to bargain and exchange.”

Formation of a scientific way of thinking in the XVII-XVIII centuries. occurred in the process of close interaction of private sciences and materialistic philosophy. A new philosophy was formed on the basis of the achievements of science, but the latter could not have arisen and got on its feet without the help of philosophical thought. The close union of science and materialistic philosophy expressed the most important features of the new type of intellect. This type of intelligence can be defined as an emerging scientific intelligence. The predominant features of this type of intellect were materialism in the explanation of nature, atheism, belief in the limitless possibilities of the mind.

The formation of scientific intelligence in the history of mankind was uneven. As part of the intelligence of the XVII-XVIII centuries. it is necessary to distinguish between the actual scientific intelligence – the intelligence of an emerging science, and philosophical intelligence, expressed in the philosophical systems of this time. If the intellect of science acts as the first form of the scientific thinking prevailing in the natural sciences, then the second cannot yet be defined as scientific intelligence, since the criteria of scientific nature in their exact sense could not yet be realized in the philosophical systems of that time. In natural science, the emergence of the original form of scientific intelligence occurred much earlier than in philosophy.

The assertion of a new, progressive bourgeois social system and the formation of science could only be ensured by this type of intellect, which was based on a realistic paradigm in its definite historical form, with certain achievements and limitations. Therefore, in the XVII-XVII centuries. Metaphysical and mechanistic materialism of F. Bacon and T. Gobbs receives the greatest development. B. Spinoza, J. Lametri, C. Helvetia, D. Diderot, P. Holbach.

The main goal of their philosophy materialists considered the formation of scientific thinking, entirely based on the requirements of reason, rather than faith. They strongly criticized the fundamentals of scholastic thinking. According to F. Bacon, this thinking is based on four misconceptions or “idols” – “clan”, “cave”, “square” and “theater”. Thus, the idol of the “theater” is a blind faith in authorities, one of the foundations of medieval thinking. From similar positions criticized the scholastic thinking of R. Descartes, who put forth in the Reasonings on Method (1637) the principle of doubt as one of the most important requirements of scientific thinking, the scientific method. Descartes regarded doubt as a necessary means, but not a goal of scientific thinking. Critical character, or constructive doubt, for the first time in a clear form justified by Descartes, entered as a necessary moment into the system of scientific thinking.

Having played a very significant role, along with factors of economic and social order, in the formation of natural science, the materialist philosophy of the XVII-XVIII centuries. At the same time, she could not form a scientific way of thinking within her own limits, in solving her own philosophical problems. This is primarily due to the fact that the actual philosophical problems go far beyond the possibilities associated with the original form of science – mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and others as they existed in modern times.

Empirical and theoretical material of private sciences in the XVII-XVIII centuries. was insufficient to form a scientific philosophy. The achievements and shortcomings of philosophical thought of the XVII-XVIII centuries, the nature and level of philosophical abstraction appeared in the nodal concepts of the philosophy of this time. The most important among them is the concept of matter. The materialists of New Age interpreted matter as nature, or an infinite aggregate of things, the “system of nature” (Holbach). This concept of matter was a new form of abstraction, quite significantly different from ancient abstractions of matter. Matter is already abstracted from its specific types of water, air, atoms, etc. and more explicitly includes the abstraction of infinity, since matter is thought of as an infinite body of things.

At the heart of the abstraction of matter as nature is a clear empirical foundation, created by science of the XVII-XVIII centuries. In essence, the abstraction of matter becomes a direct continuation and completion of the abstraction of nature, obtained in the history of science from ancient times. At the same time, the concept of matter carries essential elements of philosophical abstraction proper and, therefore, is not a mechanical borrowing from the arsenal of concepts of natural science.

These elements should be attributed primarily to the understanding of nature as an integrity and essence, opposing the spiritual world, derived from nature. An important contribution to the abstraction of matter was the concept of substance – the single fundamental principle of things. Defining substance as causa sui, “the cause of itself,” Spinoza, for the first time, introduces into the abstraction of matter the idea of ​​the relation of matter to itself, or self-determination of matter. This “closure of the abstraction of matter into itself” introduced a new essential element of philosophical thinking, which was further developed in Hegel’s philosophy and scientific philosophy.

Abstraction of matter included, further, abstractions of its most important properties, or attributes. If the views of the materialists of the XVII century. matter still possessed equal rights of motion and rest, then, following the Englishman D. Toland, the French materialists introduced a deep abstraction of motion as the absolute way of being of matter, including, as its relative moment, peace. The notion of absolute motion and relativity of peace was one of the new deep forms of abstraction, dialectical finds of materialistic philosophy. In the interpretation of the absolute and relative, the results of the emerging way of thinking are quite clearly visible, one of the expressions of which was the concept of infinitely small quantities that have a limit.

The concepts of the attributes of matter – motion, space and time – also served as a continuation and completion of concrete-scientific concepts (more precisely, mainly physical and mathematical concepts) and had a wide empirical basis. At the same time, they undoubtedly went further than natural science abstractions, represented specifically philosophical concepts.

At the same time, the empirical and concrete scientific base of the basic philosophical concepts of the New Age – matter, space and time, movement and others – was limited to certain limits, which were set by the empirical and theoretical material of mechanics, mathematics, astronomy and to some extent the beginnings of chemistry and biology. By virtue of this, the basic philosophical abstractions acquired a limited character, which was expressed primarily in their apparent metaphysicality and mechanicalism.

The main disadvantages of the abstraction of matter as nature were due to the content of the concept of nature, its limitations, embedded in the very subject of this concept. The concept of nature has so far been associated with three known forms of matter — physical, chemical, and biological. The content of the three areas of nature in the XVII-XVIII centuries. essentially reduced to mechanical properties and laws. The concept of matter therefore made sense, not going beyond the mechanistically interpreted physical, chemical and biological fields.

Possessing a certain affinity, the physical, chemical, and biological forms of matter do not reveal any integral trait that unites them as a specific whole. Therefore, attempts to impart the concept of matter as nature to a rather definite, rather than enumerated, meaning led mainly to the fact that physical, more precisely, mechanical properties were the general signs of matter. Moreover, to identify the integral, all-encompassing sign of nature is impossible because nature is infinite. The concept of nature in this sense is always incomplete, enumerated in nature.

Matter, understood as nature, could therefore not act as the essence of the world, because the integral essential feature cannot be “grasped” by virtue of the infinity of levels or areas of nature. The indefinite and incomplete nature of the abstraction of matter as nature gave the concept of matter a limited character, serving as a serious obstacle to the development of philosophical thought.

Another significant drawback of the concept of matter as nature was that this concept could not be fundamentally extended to man and society, since the latter are supernatural entities, although they include, in a subordinate and transformed form, a known natural basis (organism, population and etc.). Therefore, the restriction of the concept of matter to the sphere of nature contained a radical element of reductionism, the reduction of social, human, to a simpler natural, biological.

The third major drawback of the concept of matter in the New Age was the idea of ​​the immutable essence of matter, the fundamental immutability of material substance. Idealistic and religious conception of the creation of the material world out of nothing materialism contrasted the concept of eternal, incompatible and indestructible matter, which was regarded as existing forever in its entirety. This conceptual presentation was most clearly expressed by Spinoza in a peculiar thesis about “all the perfection of substance,” or God.

Eternity and the incompatibility or absoluteness of material substance meant for Spinoza her perfection. Substance, or God, is all perfect, for otherwise it would have to be dependent and created. In essence, “all-perfection” in Spinoza also means the infinity of substance. Substance, if it is the cause of itself, must be all-perfect, infinite. But this means that everything must already exist in substance, in the world, because if something else should arise, then the substance is always incomplete, imperfect, finite, that is, created by

Materialism XVII-XVIII centuries. was entirely based on the idea of ​​conservation, which excluded the idea of ​​development, the emergence of a new, never-before-existing. The development, the emergence of the new was represented by the philosophers as the emergence “from nothing”, i.e. creation. Without taking into account the “paradox of all-perfection” substance it is impossible to understand the nature of pre-scientific materialism. The materialism of the New Age, excluding development, proceeded from a hidden, unconscious paradigm, according to which the emergence of the new should be interpreted as “creation” and therefore should be rejected. Materialism XVII-XVIII centuries. I could not develop a form of thought that could combine the ideas of the materiality of the world and its development.

Due to these shortcomings, the concept of matter in the XVII-XVIII centuries. it was not yet scientific, since it had not yet risen to the level of universality, had a limited content. At the same time, it already carried in itself essential grains of science, which were expressed in the depths of this concept, which contained the possibility of further generalizations: in essence, the materialists of the New Age understood nature as something existing “in itself” and “for itself”, in its own content independent of any spiritual power – god, idea, human consciousness. The concept of matter as a substance concealed the possibility of further development.

The new time, owing to the demands of the asserting progressive bourgeois system, the development of new productive forces and production relations, the success of natural science, has led to the revival and development of materialistic philosophy adequate to the new stage of social progress with its realistic paradigm of thinking.

However, due to the contradictory nature of the bourgeoisie, the existence of a protective, conservative tendency, its exploitative nature, the second, fantastic, anthropomorphic thinking paradigm is preserved and developed. The main reasons for its preservation and development were undoubtedly of a social, class character. The most notable manifestation of this paradigm was the subjective-idealistic philosophy of Bishop J. Berkeley. Berkeley clearly outlined the goal of his philosophy: the destruction of “immoral materialism and atheism”. B

erkeley’s main thesis is “things are complexes of sensations,” “to exist is to be perceived.” Recognizing to some extent the principle of sensationalism, Berkeley argued that the only reality for us are “simple ideas” – the sensations of color, smell, taste, etc. Trying to refute the ideas of the great Newton about space and time, Berkeley believed that space and time are only “abstract ideas”, i.e. not given in sensations as objective forms of being. In the same way, from his point of view, matter is not given in sensations, which constitutes only an arbitrarily created idea. At the heart of Berkeley’s philosophy is clearly visible medieval form of thought – nominalism, return to which in the XVIII century. constituted undoubted archaism of thought.

The direct and inevitable consequence of the original premise of Berkeley’s philosophy was solipsism, the recognition of the existence of one given individual. However, sharing the objectively idealistic tenets of the Christian religion, Berkeley completely illogical introduced the concept of God as the guarantor of the existence of things and people. People and things, from these positions, exist as a sum of “ideas” in the mind of God.

The basic principles and criteria of scientific thinking have emerged: an explanation of nature from itself, the presence of sufficient empirical (observational and experimental) material, the use of induction and deduction methods, laws and forms of logic, in particular, evidence of the findings of science, the principle of doubt, etc.

Conclusion

Let’s sum up. XVII-XVIII centuries. – this is the time of the formation of a realistic paradigm of thinking in its scientific form, the time of the formation of a scientific way of thinking. The first form of scientific thinking was essentially one-sided, it had a strong imprint of mechanics and mathematics, it existed mainly in the field of natural science.

The formation of scientific thinking in the field of natural science and partly the social sciences (labor theory of value) was both the cause and effect of the formation and development of a realistic paradigm in the materialist philosophy of the XVII-XVIII centuries. Materialism stood at the origins of modern science and modern civilization as a whole. However, in the field of philosophical thought of the New Time, only elements of the scientific paradigm itself emerged, i.e. realistic paradigm in its scientific form. Materialistic philosophy of the XVII-XVIII centuries. I could not get a scientific character. Philosophy was still too narrow an empirical and concrete scientific base and could acquire a scientific character only on the basis of a developed natural science as a whole, in which physics, chemistry and biology would get a fairly mature appearance. In the New time, the social-class prerequisites of scientific philosophical thought did not ripen either, since the latter, based on a comprehensive realistic paradigm, could be the answer to the demands of such a social force that was interested in decisive criticism of the whole society, in the transition from an exploitation-based society. man by man, to the society of the free development of everyone.