Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2014 number 6

The article examines the phenomena of culture and the cultural and literary elite. In the first part of the work, an analysis is given of the changes and evolution of the interpretation of the category of culture in the domestic philosophical thought of the Soviet and post-Soviet era of the last fifty years. In the broadest sense, culture is a heritage of humanity; figuratively speaking, it is the wings of humanity, the manifestation of its anthropo-cosmic essence. The modern social philosophy opposes absolutization of any national culture, because it is a dead-end and unscientific way of studying culture. At the same time, social philosophers criticize the concepts of cultural relativism and isolationism, which represent the global world as a set of isolated national cultures that exist independently of one another. The article analyzes a shortened version of the interpretation of the category of culture in the domestic socio-philosophical thought in the post-war Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In this context, a very fruitful and promising socio-philosophical and culturological concept of culture due to Academician V.S. Stepin is noted, which was developed by him in the last twenty years. The features of the category of «culture» are distinguished and the innovative nature of the definition of this category by V. S. Stepin is marked, who introduced the concept of «above-biological programs» and theorized a critical role of programming in culture. The author gives the definition of the cultural elite in the broadest sense, the cultural elite in the narrow sense, as well as the literary elite as one of its components. In addition, we identified some basic criteria for determining the literary elite.