Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2016 number 4

The paper reviews the main ideas about geological knowledge beginning with those of the second half of the 19^th century and up to modern ones. We show that in the second half of the 19^th century the philosophical and methodological approach to the problems of geology had a prescriptive character, i.e. it required what geology should be, what it should study and how it should study its subject of inquiry in order to become an exact natural science. In the 20^th century, the philosophy and methodology of geology and geological knowledge focused primarily on understanding the nature of geological methods and proving the scientific character of geology. By analyzing a number of works of both foreign and domestic authors, we revealed two traditions in solving the problem of the scientific nature of geological knowledge; those are Soviet-Russian tradition and British-American one. British-American tradition considers geology to be a historical and interpretative science which interprets outcrops and thus studies the past history of the Earth. Soviet-Russian tradition treats geology as a group of historical and experimental Earth sciences; their methodological specific is complexity. The article deals with the problem of the identification of geological research and prospects of the joint use of historical, hermeneutical and experimental methods in it, as well as a place and a role of each of the three methodological approaches.