Problems of Time and History in Tanabe Hajime’s Book The Development of Historicism in Mathematics

The article examines the problem of using the ideas of set theory and general topology in philosophy on the example of book by Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) The Development of Historicism in Mathematics. It is known that topological models have been successfully applied in physics in quantum field theory. Tanabe Hajime, along with Pavel Florensky and Vladimir Ern, was one of the first to raise the question of the applicability of topology in the social and humanitarian sciences, generating with its help a model of history. Tanabe uses the tools of topology, such as the concepts of a set, its density, neighborhood, con­tinuum, section, etc., to describe and explain the mechanisms underlying social reality not as a spatial phenomenon, but as a historical time continuum. The article focuses on such components of Tanabe’s philosophy as the concept of the conti­nuity of time and history, the features of understanding the present and the relation­ship between time modes, criticism of the unification of time and space, and the con­cept of historicism. The result that the author of the article came to is the clarification of the role and place of mathematical terms and theories in the philosophical system of Tanabe Hajime, who was not limited to the use of mathematical analogies, but also actually raised the question of mathematical modeling of history.