On worldview, its structure and relation to philosophy

Integration of higher education sphere with the service sector strikes painfully the humanities and especially philosophy. The number of Russian and Western publications about the meaning of philosophy and its place in culture, increasing over the past five years, may be regarded as an indirect evidence of this trend. Another reason for the author’s scientific interest in this topic is hidden in the contradictions of globalization. Many of the UN projects are running into difficulties, which, partly, originate from the differences in worldview. The currently made attempts to analyze those are based on narrow - «two-dimensional» - models of the subject. It is not yet possible to draw a strict line between information as a part of Weltanschauung and other knowledge. The paper proposes a model which unites the current interest in the nature of philosophy with the analysis of the worldview structure. The main ideas are: 1) the structure of worldview represents a decision-making situation; 2) such a situation includes three components: some options for the subsequent advance in the course of life; then conditions, being insufficient, under which any of the alternatives can be implemented; and, finally, the criteria for selecting one or another option; 3) historical types of worldviews differ by the model of explanation, the mode of criteria justification (values, in other words), and by the level of the agent’s freedom admitted by behavior programs. These types are mythological, religious and philosophical. It seems that philosophy used to develop according to requests on rationalization of one or another part of the worldview.