Socio-philosophical methods of studying the tradition

The article examines the basic methods and approaches applied in the socio-philosophical researches of a tradition. Special attention is paid to the transition from the classical epistemology methods to the non-classical ones. While the classical epistemology was characterized by fundamentalism and normativism, the nonclassical epistemology shifts to the unique phenomena and the open systems, which makes the very possibility of discovering the general laws and rules questionable. The author also considers semiotic approaches, methods and principles of social hermeneutics that demands to see a unique phenomenon in each tradition. This brings it close to the civilizational approach and at the same time raises a question of correlation between the cultural and the social in the tradition’s existence.