Returning to the Search for Truth: Once Again on the Status of Contemporary Social Philosophy

The author examines the state of modern social philosophy, which has undergone an unprecedented attack of militant anti-scientism on nomotic thinking in social studies and the very search for objective scientific truth. This attack was under­taken by supporters of postmodernism, who sought to reduce the world as an onto­logical reality to the world of meanings, to turn philosophy into an “interpretation of interpretations”, not going beyond language and textual activity. The author is convinced that the transformation of philosophy into a metaphorical essay, indiffer­ent to or hostile to the truth, is completely intolerable in the current situation, when mankind is once again entering an era of unsecured outcomes, requiring adaptively meaningful philosophical reflection. The author states that there is a “fragmenta­tion crisis” in contemporary reflective social philosophy, whose task is to cognize the world rather than its value consciousness. In such a philosophy, there should be gnoseological coercion to the truth, which excludes the equality of alternative in­terpretations of social reality. Nevertheless, in modern reflective philosophy there are the most serious disagreements on the key problems of the study of man, soci­ety and history. The article analyzes the main contradictions arising at social-philo­sophical, general sociological and philosophical-historical levels of abstraction, considers the possibility of the formation of integral social theory, which carries out the conceptual synthesis of mutually compatible ideas and approaches