OVERCOMING METAPHYSICS BY SCIENCE?OR METAPHYSICS AND SCIENCE IN THE CULTURE OF MODERNITY

The article is devoted to the explication of the place of metaphysics in the life of an individual and culture as a whole, in particular the subject of the article is the relationship between metaphysics and science in the culture of Modernity. The author shows that today there are two main traditions of understanding this ratio. One tradition associated with the line of positivism (A. Comte, Vienna Circle) insists that with the discovery of the scientific method, metaphysics has become an excessive cultural phenomenon. The second, which goes back to German classical idealism (I. Kant, J. Fichte, F. Schelling, G. Hegel), believes that metaphysics is the foundation of all particular sciences. Accordingly, it is fundamentally irreducible both from the system of sciences and from culture as such. In article is shown that the status of science in the culture of Modernity gradually changed from confidence in its ability to know the objective world (logical positivists), through the demonstration of the ontological and epistemological boundaries of scientific knowledge (late L. Wittgenstein, R. Carnap, W. Quine), to recognizing science as close to the “form of life” myth (post-positivism). In this regard, it is concluded that science cannot claim a metatheoretical status, and therefore cannot be an implicit form of metaphysics, the relevance of which has not disappeared. Accordingly modern man, like many generations before him, continues to be doomed to metaphysics.