Source studies in the structure of current historical culture: invitation to discussion

At the turn of the XXI century, there emerged a situation of civilizational transition from postmodern to post-postmodern, characterized in historical knowledge by the continued increase in fragmentation of scientific historical knowledge amid the actualizing demand for global history and the process of renarrativization / the war of narratives in socially-oriented historiography. New epistemological problems require solutions for a number of issues in the theory of source studies and the expansion of source studies practices. The following issues are submitted for discussion: (1) expanding the source base for historical research, primarily by mitigating the dominance of written historical sources and developing tools for accessing visual and material historical sources; (2) the role of source studies in overcoming the fragmentation of historical knowledge; (3) the possibility of cooperation between the source study paradigm of historical science and the narrative logic of socially-oriented history. The problems are formulated and characterized on the basis of the neoclassical phenomenological concept of source studies, continuing the legacy of the Russian version of neo-Kantianism (A. I. Vvedensky, A. S. Lappo-Danilevsky) and focusing on precise scientific knowledge. The concept of the “empirical reality of the historical world” developed by O. M. Medushevskaya within this paradigm is proposed as a tool for solving some topical problems of historical cognition.