ON THE HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF TYPE (AND TYPOLOGICAL METHOD) IN NIKOLAI KAREEV’S METHODOLOGICAL WORKS

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study aimed at clarifying the prerequisites, meanings and contexts of the use of the concept «type» in works on the historical methodology of N.I. Kareev, whose scientific biography developed at the junctures of historical and philosophical-methodological epochs. It turns out that Kareev's methodological search is a complex multidirectional movement, not always adequately reflexible for the scientist himself. In this movement, the conceived method and the methods of solving the research problems (or presenting its results) implemented in the work performed do not at times coincide. This discrepancy is a necessary manifestation of vitality, of the organic nature of the ways of thought and cognition. Methodological Kareev’s creativity is interesting from the point of view of the task to reveal the influence on the thinker of his ideological and historical environment. It is the influence of the philosophical and scientific ideological and methodological context that can explain the metamorphosis of Kareev's judgments, when he passed from the categorical denial of the legitimacy of the typology of N.Ya. Danilevsky (cultural-historical types) to the substantiation of his own understanding of the typological method. On the basis of a comparative analysis, we can state that the understanding of the typology in the works of the historian and the methodologist of historical knowledge during the three decades of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries varied in the most significant way.  Apparently, this was mainly influenced by the researches of the typological method in N.I. Kareev's contemporary positivistic and neo-Kantian logic and methodology of science.