THE PROBLEM OF THE RESEARCH METHOD IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
The article sets a goal to give clear methodological principles for historico-philosophical research with regard to the specificity of the research. On the one hand, to bring historico-philosophical work closer to intersubjective scientific practice, on the other, to determine its differences from the hermeneutic problem of understanding per se. For this, it is making a small overview of the development of hermeneutics in the European tradition of XIX-XX centuries, uncovering the difference of the hermeneutic process as unlimited and subjective from scientific research as local and intersubjective. The proposed methodology is described in two main aspects. The first aspect is the method of working with a text. The method of philosophical conceptual analysis is taken as a basis and given its adapted version in which the problem of clarification of philosophical concepts is compared with the problem of clarification of key concepts of the text and their interconnection. The main methodological technique of the analysis is to clarify the meaning by investigation the use of words in the text by means of opposition and differentiation of semantic refinements/details, as well as generalization, that is, the identification of the common semantic core of different concepts. The obtained results are recorded in terms of the meta-language of the research. The end of this analysis is a clear structure of the text, explicating basic conceptions and problem points of the conceptions. The second aspect is the limitation of object material. The necessity of exclusion of the historico-cultural and intellectual contexts is corroborated as external constructs in relation to the concrete research. Linguistic conceptions can be considered as such constructs, if they build self-sufficient explanatory schemes of language development. The limitation is carried out primarily by means of the formation of the corpus of texts: 1) establishing a thematically linked group of texts by one author; 2) using only well-preserved texts in which a narrative is not broken. The first limitation saves from complications of the research by multiplication of conceptions, allows us to make a minimum of meaning’s deformations of the word when the context of its usage is examined. The second limitation also saves from complications of the research and demands that the textual context of a word usage was free to the maximum extent from reconstruction. As a result, the presented method is defined as textual conceptual analysis.