New Methodological and Ontological Accents in the Development of Modern Life Sciences

Abstract

Biology and other life Sciences close to it since their inception, in addition to the accumulation of empirical material and its practical use in everyday life, have tended to search for broader theoretical and philosophical bases for analyz­ing the biological reality itself and the nature of biological knowledge. This is clearly reflected both in the history of the development of biology and in the his­tory of the formation of philosophical concepts. The beginning of these studies was laid by Aristotle. In most European philosophical systems and in the works of natural biologists, the process of creating fundamental principles was grow­ing, which clarified and specified the ontological picture of biological reality and methods of its cognition. As a result of this work, the twentieth century was marked by the establishment of two fundamental principles in the reflection and knowledge of living nature – the principles of evolution and organization. The role and importance of methodological and ontological principles of the de­velopment of knowledge about the laws of nature in the modern stage of the study of complex objects is considered. It is shown that the two leading regu­latory principles that operated in the XX century – the principles of evolution and organization, gave much in the understanding of new evolutionary and orga­nizational laws and orientations. However, applied in parallel and independently of each other, nowadays they are already insufficient for the implementation of a systematic approach to the studied objects. The author introduces the idea of a new regulatory methodological principle-the principle of coevolution, which makes it possible to organically and systematically link organizational and evo­lutionary ideas. The prospects of using the evolutionary strategy to build new re­search programs in the field of philosophy of nature, man, science and culture are revealed.