Historical Thought: from Factography to Theological Synthesis

Abstract

The purpose of the work is to review the genesis of historical thought - from its ancient prototypes to the present.The widespread criticism of the very foundations of European science, which took place over many decades, beginning in the second half of the 19th century, leading to a change in the scientific paradigm at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, requires great caution in constructing explanatory models, as well as justifying the research tools themselves, before apply it. In the article, history itself acts as a toolkit as “metalogy for all logic”.

The specifics of the biblical philosophy of history are described, the biblical foundations of the formation of European historical thought, the ways of transforming historical thought in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the New Age are traced.

In the 19th century, in the transition to non-classical philosophical systems, non-classical models of the historical process also emerged. Became a crisis of historicism, which deepens in the next century and, as a consequence, leads to the intensification of eschatological topics ("end of history", "posthistory", etc.). Anti-historicism becomes the dominant direction of philosophical and historical thought. The extraordinary complexity of the social dynamics of the 19th – 20th centuries, the “unmodelability” of social processes give rise to the idea of the absence of historical determinism between eras. In the crisis of the twentieth century, the so-called "anthropological turn" leads to anthropologization, among other areas of scientific knowledge, and historiosophical thought. In the concept of neopatristic synthesis, which became the basis of a whole direction of religious and philosophical thought of the 20th–21st centuries, the perspective of a theological synthesis of history, philosophy and anthropology open.