Metacultural and anthropological dominants of history (to the didactic experience of A.Ya. Gurevich)

The paper presents the results of the studies of philosophical ideas about the history didactically implemented in a unique educational project “History of the Middle Ages” of the largest Russian mediaevalist A.Ya. Gurevich. This project has been completely analyzed in the pedagogical environment, but it is first specially investigated from its conceptual and philosophical content in connection with the current philosophical ideas about history as a theoretically multiple, poly-paradigmatic cognitive reality. It is proved that a scale, methodological and experimental project of A.Ya. Gurevich was transforming more than half-century tradition of Russian political and economic hermeneutics of the Western European Middle Ages, clarifying its own cultural and historical boundaries. As shown in the paper, A.Ya. Gurevich is offering to proceed from a certain cultural prescription of the languages of historical explanations or interpretations the person “included” in the “stream of history”; the cognitive dimensions of the “historical being” is therefore not reducible to historical abstractions of high orders, but instrumental in a holistic historical experience of the relationship to the Middle Ages, relations with metacultural and anthropological dominants of modern historical knowledge. Project A.Ya. Gurevich, as it follows from the contents of the paper, became a unique experiment, a kind of experience in the practical philosophy of history, in which preference was given to the attitudes of a living historical mind could not be reduced to pure rationality or autonomous merit of historical cognitive efforts.