The European Cultural Tradition and Us: the Ideas of M.K. Petrov

The subject of the article is the main problems of the European cultural tradition, considered by M.K. Petrov, and the questions of its specificity and continuity in the historical development from ancient philosophy to experimental sci­ence raised by him. The historical and philosophical context of his formation of the original theory of types of cultures is reconstructed. The rejection of He­gelian panlogism and the position on the universality of a linear development that is uniform for all cultures raises the question of the internal sources of cul­tural development. The article shows that Petrov is looking for answers on the paths of linguistics and the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. Turning to ancient philosophy allows Petrov to reconstruct the intellectual events caused by the emergence of language as a human invention, which broke ties with the former world of stable meanings and opened up the space for the emancipa­tion of the word and the desacralization of knowledge. In this context, the article examines a number of controversial issues about the biocode and sociocode, the name and sign that allowed them to remain the center of an extra-biological system of social coding, and about the diversity of cultures in a polycentric world. Questions are raised about the correlation of Petrov’s positions and mo­dern cultural anthropology