The theses of Ilyenkov and Korovikov revisited, or what's the use of the polemic between «gnoseologists» and «ontologists»

Ilyenkov and Korovikov presented their sensational theses on the subject of philosophy long before the Khrushchev Thaw. Although the authors of the theses were ostracized, Ilyenkov became the founder of the so-called «gnoseologism», and the dispute between «gnoseologists» and «ontologists» occupied the minds of leading theorists in the field of dialectical materialism for two decades. The point is that both parties considered themselves authentic spokesmen for Engels’s position. However, a close scrutiny of his construction of the «great basic question of all philosophy» shows one-sidedness of both approaches. Additional evidence in favor of the mutual but hidden relationship of the ontological and the epistemological in philosophical disputes can be obtained through analyzing the evolution of the idea of substance from Milesians to Parmenides. The concept of being, introduced by the head of the Elean school, had the distinction between knowledge-in-opinion and knowledge-in-truth as its premise. In the fourth section of the article, the author proposes that philosophy has its own empirical basis and tries to show it with the help of Engels’s description of pre-reflective ideas about the soul-and-body relationship. It is observed that in this thinking Engels opted for the phenomenological manner. This approach gets its development in the section «How is the basic question of philosophy possible». Here the author argues that such a question exists and its current form is the relationship of the subjective and the objective. This conclusion is supported, firstly, by peculiarities of the philosophical question as such, analysis of which was performed by Floridi. Another thought-provoking point is Russell’s proposal to differentiate between questions of philosophy and questions posed by philosophers. Finally, the article discusses the importance of the polemic under study for clarifying the structure of the worldview.