Abstract

This article concerns the evolution of philosopher and lawyer Yevhen Spektorskyi’s views on social science in the context of social thought of that time. At the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century in Russian philosophy appeared a strong need for a search for an alternative to positivism and Marxism interpretation of sociology, which would enable it to deal with pressing social and ethical issues. Neo-Kantian philosophy became one of those alternatives, and it had a profound influence on Spektorskyi at the beginning of his academic career when he justified the importance of social sciences on the basis of the human ability to set goals. Having been disappointed in a study of oughtness, Spektorskyi turned on genealogical research into social science whose key phenomenon he believed to be the social physics of the 17th century. Spektorskyi reached a conclusion that a mechanical view on the individual and society, which was typical for the modern era thought, could not grasp all the aspects of both a person and a society, therefore, oriented towards natural sciences, social physics had failed. In his own philosophical research, Spektorskyi struggled to cohere the ideal of rational science and a possibility to examine the human as a moral being by developing his classification of sciences and critically rethinking the very basis of the social science. Spektorskyi’s works written in emigration were focused on cultural and religious issues that offered a fresh perspective on social science. He considered Christian philosophy to be an idealistic one and used it as a basis for his own version of Christian sociology that understood society in regard to the Christian ideal of an individual and community.Manuscript received 04.09.2020.