SOURCE STUDIES OF THE LATE XIX – EARLY XXI CENTURIES BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND CULTUROLOGY

During the period from the late XIX to the early XXI century historians increasingly began paying at-tention to dimensionality in history, with this process intensified in the 1970s. Scholars started to actively use variouscyclical scales for measuring crisis phenomena from the 3–4-year Kitchin cycle, 12-year Ignatyev cycles, and 45–60-year Kondratyev cycles to the longue durée historical time concept of Braudel, the scales of historical time and spaceof Pomerants, 400–600-year Fursov cycles, etc. The concepts of socio-economic formations and the stadial develop-ment of civilizations became pertinent again. It was one of the typical signs of shifting from one scientific paradigm toanother on the scale of historical and cultural eras. The article discusses two aspects of the posed problems: the conceptsof postmodernity and post-postmodernity and the framework outlining the position of the modern source-study knowl-edge of historiographical sources in the current historical culture. The author examines the structural composition ofhistorical knowledge and changes in the problems of modern source studies from the perspective of replacing the sci-entific paradigm of the modern era with the paradigm of the postmodern era as a new historical and cultural epoch. Ap-proaches to the study of sources created by different paradigms coexist in science because of the diversity of functionsand the synthetic nature of historical knowledge. The postmodern science raises the question of the cultural content ofhistorical knowledge, which allows modern source studies to introduce into the orbit of its functioning techniques andmethods for studying the same sources in generalizations of different logical capacity and, most importantly, to ensurecomparable trajectories of the historical thought movement during the transition from one level of generalization to an-other. The article compares the possibilities of source studies as a special and systemic discipline and offers a dynamicmodel of the discursive field of historiographic sources. The author emphasizes the demand of the current historical culture for mastering the multifactorial nature of the field of source studies, the topological nature of historical knowledge, and the dynamic nature of the postmodern historical models.

source studies of historiography, historical culture, modern era, postmodern era, generalization levels of different logical capacity, general systems theory, dynamical systems theory, structuralism, system method, modeling