Several conversations from the "Interviews" section are devoted to various problems of philosophy and the history of science, which echo the main theme of our issue. Scientists who took part in them tell about their own vision of the relationship between science and religion in historical research, as well as about their personal path in studying the history and philosophy of scientific knowledge.

Ilya Teodorovich Kasavin-Doctor of Philosophy, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Social Epistemology Sector of the Institute of Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, organizer of the international project " Science and Spirituality "(2005-2009), editor of the collections " The Deluded Mind: the Diversity of Extra-scientific Knowledge "(1990) and "Science and Religion: an Interdisciplinary and Cross-cultural Approach" (2006), devoted to the problems of interrelation of religious and scientific knowledge in historical and philosophical perspective.

Evgeny Borisovich Rashkovsky-Doctor of Historical Sciences, Director of the Research Center for Religious Literature and Publications of the Russian Abroad of the M. I. Rudomino All-Russian State Library of Higher Education, Chief Researcher of IMEMO RAS, author of the books "Science in the East "(1980) and "The Origin of Scientific Thought in Asia and Africa" (1985).

Vadim L. Rabinovich-Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Head of the "Languages of Cultures" section of the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies, author of the books "Alchemy as a phenomenon of medieval culture "(1976, 2012-second edition) and " Confessions of a book reader who taught the letter and strengthened the spirit "(1991).

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Ilia Kasavin - Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Head of the Department of Social Epistemology, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. itkasavin@gmail.com

This is an interview with a known Russian philosopher Ilia Kasavin, a specialist in epistemology and philosophy of culture and religion. Dr. Kasavin deals with two issues. One is history of philosophical research of these subjects in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia, in which he was directly involved. The second concerns major trends in perception of religious, mythological and magical worldviews within the philosophy of knowledge. The interaction between science and non-science were complex in the Middle Ages and Early Modern times, but this interaction, if mostly in hidden form, does persist even now when the hegemony of science is questioned.

Keywords: non-scientific forms of knowledge, magic, myth, institutionalization of science, religion and scientific revolution, Paul Feyerabend.

Ilya Teodorovich, thank you for agreeing to give an interview for our magazine. For many years, the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been paying special attention to the problem of the relationship between scientific and religious discourses. You were directly involved in the study of this issue. Could you say a few words about how the problems of the relationship between religion and science have become part of the Institute's scientific program?

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Ilya Kasavin. I would not put the question so narrowly as part of the scientific program of the institute. The fact is that this problem developed not only in the institute, but in general, with the era of perestroika, as we know, there were major changes in the sphere of philosophical objectivity, the methodological arsenal of philosophy and a number of philosophical disciplines, new philosophical disciplines emerged, and the names of others were reformulated.

It so happened that one of my closest friends from the first years of my studies at the Lomonosov Moscow State University was Alexander Nikolaevich Krasnikov. After completing the course, he worked at the Department of Scientific Atheism of the Faculty of Philosophy, and I was hired at the Institute of Philosophy in the sector of theory of knowledge. And we began to master this issue from different sides. He did this in the aspect of substantiating the scientific status of religious studies in order to show that the analysis of religion can be not ideological, but actually scientific. My colleagues and I approached this in a different way, by justifying the need to study the entire diversity of cognitive experience, that is, not only scientific, which was accepted within the framework of Marxist philosophy, but also religious, pre -, proto - religious, mythical, magical, ordinary, artistic, moral. So religion became in the form of religious experience one of the legal parts of subject-epistemological research, along with other types of knowledge.

Our task was to show that each type of knowledge has its own methods of justification, criteria of perfection and rationality. And, accordingly, of course, the ways of social institutionalization and social legitimation in general. The latter was important because this program was developed within the framework of what is now called social epistemology, that is, an approach to knowledge through the prism, first of all, of social conditionality, the social nature of cognitive processes.

If we talk about the time when exactly this took place, then, of course, it was the post-perestroika era. I'll give you one example. In 1985, the magazine, in my opinion it was called "New Books Abroad", was such a small re-

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a literary magazine asked me to do an analytical review of a book devoted to the historical and cultural analysis of magic; the author was Rutherford, but not a physicist. For a year, I did not know anything about the fate of my text, although all the previous ones were published quite quickly. Then it turned out that in 1986 it was published almost under the heading "secret", and the entire issue was sent to special storage for official use precisely because the book discussed the nature of magic. Now it looks rather ridiculous, but even in 1986, as you may remember, when Perestroika began, this was the order of the day.

And it was at this time that our research group started working at the Institute of Philosophy, which was called "Analysis of extra-scientific forms of knowledge", it was a rather clumsy name, but, nevertheless, it reflected the content. And using the first steps of our rotaprint workshop at the Institute of Philosophy, we published, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in the year 1987, a rotaprint collection called "Analysis of Non-scientific Knowledge". And oddly enough, then he even became famous even outside of Moscow.

In general, the work program of our group was not initially formulated clearly, but it matured historically and was implemented in a variety of ways that characterize academic scientific life. We have published a number of books, received various grants from Soros and Volkswagen, and then Russian ones, held scientific conferences, and made major international research projects on this topic. One of the projects was called, in particular, "Wissenschaftliche und ausserwis-senschaftliche Denkformen", that is,"Scientific and extra-scientific forms of thinking". Our partner in this project was a well-known German philosopher, Professor at the University of Kiel Kurt Huebner, whose book "The Truth of Myth" (as well as a number of others) we have translated as part of this large program.

Relatively recently, about five years ago, we completed a large project supported by the John Templeton Foundation, in which a number of Russian universities participated under the auspices of the Institute of Philosophy. The subject matter there was similar, in English it sounds like "Science and Technology".

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Spirituality", in Russian "Science and spirituality". As a result of the project, several books were published in Russian and one in English, in the United States. We can talk a lot about these books, and they all contain the results of our work. The most important of them, which became the property of the broadest public several years ago, is that the course on "History and Philosophy of Science", which is taught to both undergraduates and postgraduates of Russian universities, includes a section on the analysis of extra-scientific knowledge.

Of course, a philosophical dialogue with the Church, with Orthodox theologians, took place in parallel, taking into account the peculiarities of the ecclesiastical and religious situation in our country. Metropolitan Filaret and our academician V. S. Stepin have been holding seminars for some time, in which I also participated, and in which our philosophers and theologians from the Patriarchate exchanged views. Unfortunately, although these conversations had a positive meaning - we looked at each other, talked, generally heard each other, but they also revealed that there is no particularly deep understanding between us. I think this is quite normal. After all, both I and the older generation were brought up in a general atheistic spirit, and even without being militant atheists, without denying the right of every person to believe what they want, but we still used to believe that science is generally autonomous, does not really need a dialogue with non-science, although if you look at this question historically, this is certainly not the case at all.

And many quite secular philosophers have argued that religious, magical, and mythical forms of knowledge played a significant role in the history of the formation of empirical natural science in Modern times. And not only forms of knowledge, but even ways to institutionalize knowledge. At least, Mikhail Konstantinovich Petrov very convincingly showed that logic, namely logic, and not the empirical history of the emergence of empirical natural science in Modern times, implies the translation of the disciplinary matrix from theology to science. It was theology that formulated the main standards of scientific research, at a time when science as such did not yet exist. Then they were assimilated by Modern science with certain corrections.

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This may seem far-fetched to some, but in reality, if we remember what happened in European universities up to the nineteenth century, it will not be so surprising. Universities were faced with the task, ironically enough, of integrating scientific knowledge into themselves. For a very long time, universities have not been engaged in science. The French Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London originated outside the university. And then it was important to involve the very scientists who were grouped independently of the university in university activities precisely as scientists, because they were practically all theologians at the same time, and if they taught something at the university, they taught theology or classical languages. And science was done electively within the framework of some scientific societies, that is, the science was amateur. So it was going to be put on the same track that theology was already firmly established in the same university. And if today, for example, a Department of theology is opened at MEPhI, then it will have to adapt to the scientific standards that exist at the University of Engineering and Technology, and at that time science was forced to adapt to theological standards and, of course, modify them.

The scientific field of " Science and Religion "is actively developing in the West, you mentioned the John Templeton Foundation, conferences and congresses are held, and there is a special course on"science and religion" at Western universities. What do you think, in principle, does this scientific field need to be institutionalized and, if so, what is being done in this area in Russia and what are the prospects for further development?

This issue was the subject of active discussion at the international events that took place within the framework of the Templeton project. I would like to refer here to the opinion of the French-Romanian physicist Bazarb Nicolescu, who was actively involved in this project. He said something like this: Today, this is the field of transdisciplinary research. It hardly makes sense to make it a standard discipline, like all other academic disciplines

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disciplines. Let it develop as a field of transdic-tional research-this will provide greater freedom, not impose paradigmatic obligations, and allow people to conduct a more or less free dialogue.

In addition to what you have said, I would like to point out that there are certain difficulties in institutionalizing interdisciplinary research. All over the world, their institutionalization is at a very early stage of development, and there are relatively few universities, research centers, laboratories or institutes that would rely on it. In general, as long as interdisciplinary research does not become a discipline, there are big problems in terms of their institutionalization.

Of course, there are such areas as, for example, psycholinguistics, this is obviously an interdisciplinary field, and such laboratories and departments exist, but it took quite a long time before it was built up and formed as a special kind of discipline. What is the main difficulty here? When you need to solve a complex scientific problem, they are very willing to use interdisciplinary research, gather experts from different fields of science, and they solve this problem. But the results of their research become recognized only when they are included in the structure of disciplinary knowledge. Roughly speaking, the results will be evaluated by "disciplinary" scientists, so it turns out that: as for the research process, this is as long as you want, but the institutional framework for it can only be temporary. In many ways, it seems to me that this applies to the problems of science and religion: projects of this kind can be interesting, you can hold scientific events on this topic, you can write books, but it seems unnecessary to create departments or sectors for this - I have the impression that this problem will die in this case.

The problem of the relationship between science and religion in the historical perspective is a rather developed topic. Is there a vector of the direction of the relationship between science and religion in history, that is, the relationship between them in history somehow changes?

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In general, I would not talk about the relationship between science and religion, which is not entirely correct, but about the relationship between science and theology. Because theology is a complex of disciplines, and science is also a complex of different sciences and disciplines, so there may be some relations between them that it would be interesting for me as a philosopher or a specialist in the theory of knowledge to talk about.

The relationship between science and religion is quite different. Religion is, after all, a worldview, and science is a social institution. That's what I see as incorrect. We can talk about the relationship between the church and science, these are two social institutions, but this brings us to the institutional plane.

Generally speaking, religion in our country, as in any democratic society, must exist independently of the state, and science, on the contrary, must be supported by the state in every possible way, otherwise it will die, at least in the form of fundamental science. And here, of course, there is a strong inequality of rights, which may not be very noticeable in our country, but in other secular countries it is quite noticeable...

As for the dynamics of relations, everything is determined by who is "leading". As we understand, until the middle of the XVIII century, the entire complex of church-religious institutions and related forms of knowledge was in the lead, and then gradually science began to take the lead again in the form of a social institution. Until science took the form of a social institution, it had little chance of competing with the church. Yes, of course, we need to talk not only about competition. It was a rather problematic interaction, and for both sides it was quite painful, but at the same time fruitful. Science drew something from religion, refused something categorically, about theology I have already mentioned. Theologians also clashed with scientists, but at the same time perceived something.

Today, I think, where are the points of growth of theological knowledge that can be used to "compete" with science, to interact with science? It is more or less generally accepted that there are three such growth points. This is the problem of the emergence of the world, the problem of the emergence of th-

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loveka and the problem of the emergence of consciousness. Why? Because in science, there are gaps in the explanation of these things: science cannot unequivocally prove how the universe came into being, how man came into being, and how to solve the riddle of consciousness.

Theologians offer their own answers. If it hadn't been for divine intervention, they say, nothing would have happened. Experts in ufology say in these cases that if it were not for extraterrestrial intervention, if it were not for extraterrestrial civilizations, then nothing special would have happened either. I don't know about the origin of the world, but I do know about man and consciousness. Well, with the world, too, we can assume that our entire world is a large laboratory that was launched by some very influential aliens.

How these problems will be solved will largely determine how the relations between theology and science will unfold. If scientists are more or less successful in moving in this direction, then theologians will have to take these results into account, and if not, then there will be every reason for scientists to pay more attention to the theological point of view.

Here is a question in connection with the problem of distinguishing between the concepts of science, religion and theology. Since the 1980s, discussions have developed in the history of science about the applicability of fundamental categories of the history of science to the historical material they are aimed at, such as "science", "religion" and "scientific revolution". For example, there is a well-known discussion about the problem of the correlation between the concepts of "science" and" natural philosophy " as different ways of describing the works of scientists of the XVII century. What can you say about this linguistic-theoretical critique? How productive is it in principle?

I must say that in the history of science, in the theoretical history of science, there are big and not fully resolved problems related to what "science" is, when it originated, what stages it went through, and how to interpret its development. There are many views

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and methodological guidelines in this regard. I am close to the approach that considers the history of science and our ability to reconstruct it through the prism of the concepts of "presentism"and " antiquarism".

"Presentism" is a way of understanding the past, when current ideas about a certain phenomenon, in this case, about science, are superimposed on its history. Today's concept of science, that is, a theoretical concept, is a definition that is built within the framework of a modern conceptual scheme and is superimposed on what science was in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern times. This is such a view from the present. "Antiquarism" is an attempt to understand the past as such, ignoring the fact that this past had a certain perspective, developed.

Both of these approaches stand out as a pair because they are, of course, one-sided, but together they capture important things. We will not be able to remove the "glasses of modernity" when we look at the past. In this sense, we are all "presenters"in some part of our vision of the past. It is impossible to get rid of it. But if we take history seriously, then we are also "antiquarians" in a sense, because we say that the previous stage was fundamentally different from the next, and this is not just an invention of historians with "modern glasses", because this was actually the case.

It seems to me that there are a lot of undeveloped theoretical problems related, in particular, to the concept of historical in general; what is, say, a historical fact? I have a certain formula for understanding the phenomenon of the historical in general. I will try to explain this with an example. Here we are looking at an episode in history, let it be the well-known October Revolution, whatever you want to call it. This is a phenomenon that, of course, had its causes and its consequences. The historian, it seems to me, should have little interest in the causes of a historical event. Simply because opening these reasons is an almost impossible task. There are a lot of them. We can point out some causes, some conditions, but we cannot accurately infer this event from these conditions. But what we can do with much greater accuracy is trace its consequences. We to-

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We know exactly what the consequences of the October Revolution were. A historical event is historical in so far as it conditions history, in so far as it "makes" history, that is, in so far as historically important consequences follow from it.

It seems to me that this allows us to take a more adequate approach, in particular, to the reconstruction of the history of cognition. If we look at ancient science, we can certainly say that ancient astronomy was based on the Egyptians, the Babylonians. But, in my opinion, this is not so important. It is much more important that, say, the global synthesis that Ptolemy carried out is still used, as in Modern times and in the time of Copernicus, but today simply because if you need to calculate the trajectory of a projectile, then no one will imagine themselves standing in the Sun...

Moving on to more specific questions of the history of science and the problem of the influence of, as it seems, not quite scientific ideas on the development of science... What would you say about the impact of the so-called "hermetic factor" on the development of Western European natural science?

We were particularly interested in this topic. We have written four books on this subject, which have been published since 1990. This topic interested me mainly, I analyzed, in fact, the relationship between magic and science, more precisely, scientific and magical knowledge, including in the form of occult sciences.

In 1990, we published the well-known book "The Deluded Mind: the Diversity of Extra-scientific Forms of Knowledge". Back then, books were published in hundreds of thousands of copies. Two years later, a book called The Magic Crystal was published, which contained an anthology of contemporary texts dealing with magic and the occult sciences. Then we published two books devoted to the history of various deviant forms of knowledge from the point of view of science, starting from Antiquity and ending with the XIX century.

It turned out, in fact, that we created something like a small alternative history of thought. It's no secret that

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in general, the history of thought, the history of philosophical and scientific thinking, is mainly built on the basis of rationalistic standards borrowed from the Enlightenment, and everything that does not fall into these standards was generally erased until recently. All irrationalist philosophies, as they were called, and still are sometimes called today, were regarded as secondary, marginal, and essentially unimportant.

What was at the center of the history of philosophy then? By the way, this fact characterized not only the Marxist history of philosophy, but also, to a certain extent, Western European thinking in general. Of course, it was not Schopenhauer, Pascal, or Kierkegaard who were at the center, but primarily classical English empiricism and German idealism - that has always formed the axis or pivot of historical and philosophical research. And German Romantics, for example, or there medieval mysticism has always been on the periphery. The same applies to Gnostic teachings in antiquity, which then could not compete with Plato and Aristotle, although Plato has quite enough mystical motives: if this is not understood, then the Timaeus is meaningless to read.

So we tried to take a decisive step in an alternative direction, and we found almost all the people who either wrote dissertations on these topics, or were seriously engaged in this. Well, let's say John Dee or Paracelsus - these thinkers were completely unknown in Russia until recently, and we were the first to translate their texts into Russian. Paracelsus, of course, is known as a physician on the one hand, as a mystic on the other, but if it were not for his mystical ideas, then in fact he would not have been able to formulate any theoretical or quasi-theoretical ideas of a medical nature. There was no medical terminology, except for that of Hippocrates-Galen, but it was no longer acceptable to Paracelsus. Paracelsus also introduced "allopathy", the use of inorganic substances for the manufacture of medicines, before that it was not accepted, it was believed that if a person is an organic body, then it can only be treated with animal and vegetable juices, and use sulfur

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or mercury was unwise. In order to justify such actions, and especially pharmacology, Paracelsus had to formulate certain theoretical concepts. And he did it in his mytho-mystical-magical language, which contained new medical terminology. This is a concrete example of how completely unscientific forms of knowledge contributed to the formation of completely scientific knowledge, if, of course, medicine is considered as a branch of science.

Another example is the German Romantics, who have always been in the shadow of German classical idealism. There were certain reasons for this, in particular, because Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were all university professors. Here they just worked in the system of the Institute of Science, which was then actively forming, and German Romantics worked on its periphery.

Today, it seems to me, a qualified historian of science should assess the influence of the German Romantics, for example, on the formation of the anti-Newtonian picture of the world and electromagnetic theory. I do not mean the electromagnetic theory that was formed against the background of mechanistic ideas, but a later development, when the concepts of particles and fields were already opposed, when the concept of the force of electromagnetic interaction received its own specifics - after all, the electromagnetic interaction is significantly different from the mechanical one, which was not understood for a long time. It seems to me that there is a certain perspective for research here, but, unfortunately, this issue does not attract proper attention yet.

Johann Ritter, for example, studied natural electricity and tried to fantasize and theorize on this topic, and he understood it, of course, not in a Newtonian way, but in his own specific way. We have tried to take the first steps here by translating the works in which Ritter called these electromagnetic interactions "siderism", connected them with cosmic influence, with the" soul " of metals, etc., i.e., also used the terms he coined. In my opinion, there is something quite promising here from the point of view of the history of cognition.

Finally, there are textbook cases, such as the relationship between alchemy and chemistry. This is an example that is in otli-

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chiyo from others was included in textbooks, but also in a not quite correct form. The fact is that scientists did not stop believing in the transmutation of metals, the possibility of an elixir of youth, a panacea, even when at the level of scientific institutions these ideas were considered unscientific. And they were right in a theoretical sense, but it's another matter that turning lead into gold today is just as inefficient as extracting it from ocean water. Perhaps a technology will be invented that will make this a commercially viable enterprise, just as today such gold deposits are successfully developed that would seem completely unattractive to the heroes of Jack London. And what can we say about the success of genetic engineering, which threatens to turn alchemical fantasies into everyday reality?

Probably, this kind of interaction between science and non-science is characteristic not only for the era of the Middle Ages and Modern times. I have a suspicion that some similar interactions are taking place today. When you listen to some modern scientists, physicists, biologists, and mathematicians, it often occurs to you that they are not just based on scientific ideas. The hypotheses that they present often have no empirical support, and it seems that they largely derive their theoretical enthusiasm from some mytho-magical picture of the world, which is borrowed in a very complex way by transmitting knowledge from a rather distant past. Perhaps this is evidence of the looseness of scientific thinking, to which we have finally lived. But there is also something in this from the desire to make advertising for yourself, to achieve not too expensive fame. This is also a sign of modernity, and quite sad. Let us recall Karl Gauss, a German mathematician who was the first to formulate non-Euclidean geometry, but did not publish these results. Does that make him any less great?

How did you start your career in the history and philosophy of science, maybe there is some topic or problem that caught your attention, maybe there were people who directed your attention to this topic?

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With me, everything was very simple. It was my father. Teodor Ilyich Oizerman. He recommended that I take the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend as the topic of my PhD thesis. Thankfully, my supervisor, Alexey Sergeyevich Bogomolov, didn't mind, even though he wanted me to study Whitehead. I also took up Whitehead, but not to the same extent.

So Paul Feyerabend (1924 - 1994) became the focus of my interest for several years. He was a man who carried out a kind of revolution, if you will, a revolution in the philosophy of science, writing the well-known book "Against Method", in which he shows that all attempts of philosophers of science to argue about some general methodological basis of science are poorly justified. Different sciences use different methods, different scientists again use different methods, not all of these methods have to do with logic, not all have to do with facts. There is a lot of rhetoric, conventions, prejudices, a lot of political bias in scientific activity, scientists are the same people as everyone else, and they achieve their goals, in general, by approximately the same methods as other people. Therefore, the omnipotence of scientific experts is unacceptable, it serves not to establish the truth, but to strengthen political authoritarianism. And science is one of the social institutions that should be equidistant from the centers of power, like all other social institutions.

Paul Feyerabend put forward these ideas not because he wanted to destroy science, but primarily because he was categorically dissatisfied with the dogmatic attitude that was present in the Anglo-American philosophy of science at that time. At first, this attitude was fueled by the works of the Vienna Circle, and then by the philosophy of Karl Popper, which was promoted by his not very creative students. Feyerabend, himself a student of Popper's, criticized both, earning him a reputation as an anarchist, which he did not relinquish.

One of the theses of Feuerbend and some of his colleagues, such as Kurt Huebner, or, say, Helmut Spiner, was the statement that all types of knowledge, in fact, are equally rational. All of them have their own special diet.-

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nality - and science, and magic, and religion, and myth. It is important to keep in mind here that Feyerabend was a man educated in all possible fields, from mathematics and physics to theater and philosophy. He carefully justified his claims with various historical examples, in particular, studies of the works of Galileo and demonstrating that Galileo's experiments were very similar to the thought experiments that Aristotle conducted.

At the same time, the empirical evidence that Galileo received was inexpensive - and he cites in his book a drawing of Galileo, in which the Moon is depicted with a hole in the middle. This is what Galileo saw through the telescope. When Galileo reported such imperfections of the celestial body to a theologian, the latter told him:: "You should still pay close attention to the quality of the lenses you use, because we all know that celestial bodies are perfect and can not have such shortcomings that you "saw" here." Feyerabend gave the first and strongest impetus to my own reflections both on the nature of science and on the relationship between scientific and non-scientific knowledge, and then I somehow tried to develop this topic on my own.

Unfortunately, the times have come when we cannot follow Feyerabend in his theoretical research, but we must do our best to protect science and philosophy from the ignorant, crooks and unscrupulous politicians. Today, it would be quite useful to listen to scientific experts for making socially significant decisions. I believe that the political elite has taken the path of underestimating science in all respects-as a condition for learning and personal development, as a theoretical thinking and as a factor of social and technical transformation. She took Feyerabend's ideas too literally, and if he were still alive, he would have turned the brunt of his criticism on her. This is how the history and philosophy of science reveal their ideological sound, which should not be forgotten.

Interviewed by V. Razdiakonov

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