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 attention to dimensionality in history, with this process intensified in the 1970s. Scholars started to actively use various cyclical scales for measuring crisis phenomena, from the 3-4-year Kitchin cycle, 12-year Ignatyev cycles, and 4560-year Kondratyev cycles to the longue duree historical time concept of Braudel, the scales of historical time and space of Pomerants, 400-600-year Fursov cycles, etc. The concepts of socio-economic formations and the stadial development of civilizations became pertinent again. It was one of the typical signs of shifting from one scientific paradigm to another on the scale of cultural and historical eras. The article discusses two aspects of the posed problems: the concepts of postmodernity and post-postmodernity and the framework outlining the position of the modern source-study knowledge of historiographical sources in the current historical culture. The author examines the structural composition of historical knowledge and changes in the problems of modern source studies from the perspective of replacing the scientific paradigm of the modern era with the paradigm of the postmodern era as a new historical and cultural epoch. Approaches to the study of sources created by different paradigms coexist in science because of the diversity of functions and the synthetic nature of historical knowledge. The postmodern science raises the question of the cultural content of historical knowledge, which allows modern source studies to introduce into the orbit of its functioning techniques and methods for studying the same sources in generalizations of different logical capacity and, most importantly, to ensure comparable trajectories of the historical thought movement during the transition from one level of generalization to another. The article compares the possibilities of source studies as a special and systemic discipline and offers a dynamic model of the discursive field of historiographical 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.