Olga Mikhailovna Medushevskaya's concept of cognitive history: results / prospects

The concept of cognitive history offered by O. M. Medushevskaya (1922-2007) is analyzed in the context of the historical culture of the 2010s and the 2020s. The relevance of the work is due to the need to establish the concept of history as a rigorous science in the context of renarrativization, a trend of modern historical culture accompanied by a deepening gap between historical science and socially oriented historiography. The novelty of the work lies in the consideration of the neoclassical model of historical science at the junction of two historical cultures amid the drastic shift of historical culture from postmodern to post-postmodern. The problem of the study is to determine the place of the concept of cognitive history in the context of modern historical culture. The aim of the study is to explicate the factors determining the insufficient demand for the concept of cognitive history despite the undoubted relevance of the neoclassical model of historical cognition in the context of overcoming the postmodern paradigm. The objectives of the work are to consider the concept of cognitive history from two perspectives: as the completion of more than a century-old tradition of the development of the phenomenological structural concept of source studies dating back to the Russian version of neo-Kantianism (A. S. Lappo-Danilevsky), and from the point of view of its future prospects for the social knowledge of the XXI century. Special attention is paid to the immanent properties of such a basic concept of cognitive history as the “empirical reality of the historical world”, which completes the transformation of the object of source studies from a historical source through a system of types of historical sources to the macro object of historical cognition establishing the empirical basis of history as a rigorous science. The research uses the methodology of cognitive history based on the phenomenological concept of source studies of the historiography and the concept of “historical culture” formed in the problem field of intellectual history. The research resulted in revealing the factors preventing the spread of the theory pertaining to the field of historical culture and immanent to the concept itself. The paper offers the directions for the further development of the concept - namely, adjusting the configuration of its conjugacy with the actual historical culture, the basic factor of which is the process of renarrativization. The focus is on the phenomenological component of the concept of the “empirical reality of the historical world” and on its immanent structure, interpreted by source studies as the problem of classification of historical sources.