Methodological Reflections on the Guide to Philosophy

The research discusses approaches to creating teaching guides to philosophy, taking into account the specifics of the disciplinary and social status of philosophy. The author traces changes in notions about philosophy and its place in the disciplinary structure of higher education, and shows how the gradual separation of science from philosophy led to the discrediting of philosophy as an academic subject and the formation of widespread stereotypes about the practical uselessness and rudimentary nature of philosophical knowledge. In addition, the situation is determined by the crisis of “grand narratives” and changes in the reading culture caused by digitalization, as a result of which modern students avoid voluminous “upright” organized texts and poorly internalize complex narrative structures. The author states that under such conditions of educational activities, the monumental systemic-historical presentation of philosophy, traditional for domestic teaching aids, turns out to be didactically disadvantageous. An appeal to the foreign experience of teaching guides and textbooks shows significantly less attention to the systematicity and integrity, instead of which the reader is offered a collection of autonomous examples of philosophical activity, grouped around themes independent of each other. As a result, at the cost of fragmentation and vulgarization of philosophical knowledge, its actualization and rapprochement with the reader is achieved. In conclusion, it is proposed to combine the advantages of domestic and foreign approaches to the construction of guides and textbooks on philosophy: to use an encyclopedic model of text organization; to balance historical-philosophical and modern material, giving preference to topical issues; to achieve the integrity of the subject not due to narrative organization, but due to the thematic and subdisciplinary structures of philosophy; to demonstrate the specificity and achievements of domestic philosophical knowledge within particular themes depending on the degree of interest in them in the Russian research field and the presence of significant results; to take the topic of the differences of Russian intellectual culture from Western European in a separate chapter.