Crisis of Knowledge at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Abstract

The contemporary crisis of thinking and knowledge is a consequence of positivism and its various branches leading to the extinction of philosophy and refusing to deal with the basic philosophical questions. Positivism became the basis for scientific knowledge replacing Hegelian dialectical rationalism, in which the classical philosophy had achieved its apex. Positivism tried to create the principles for scientific research based on the rules of formal logic and experiment, where the axiomatic approach became a starting point for finding the useful scientific results. Positivism refused to deal with the basic philosophical questions and categories regarding the nature of Being, God and the physical Universe. The way to the truth became “scientific” with many successful and useful discoveries and inventions. The dialectic logic was rejected as speculative, sophistic, metaphysical and useless and replaced by formal logic which together with mathematics and experimental verifications became the basic methods of scientific research mainly in the sphere of theoretical physics.