Abstract

The paper offers an interpretation of the way epistemology was formed at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century as a new approach to understanding of the nature of humanitarian and social knowledge. The role of ideas of such Neo-Kantians as H. Cohen, H. Rickert and E. Cassirer in the formation of Russian epistemology is underlined. These ideas were critically reassessed in works of historian D. Petrushevskiy and sociologist N. Kareev. Special attention is paid to G. Shpet, his “Hermeneutics” and his studies in history as a problem of logic. It is shown how M. Bakhtin constructs the world of historically actual “participative” consciousness of the “whole” human being, how he replaces the relation of subject and object by the unity of the cognitive, the ethical, and the aesthetical. Rather than abstract gnoseology, rich logic and epistemology, as a non-formalized study close to the nature of humanitarian and social knowledge, undergo the scrutiny.