Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2024 number 3

The article examines the ecosystem foundations of the concept of social resilience as a theoretical and methodological approach to studying the ways in which society can overcome global challenges. The concept of resilience was proposed by the Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling. When studying the development of ecological systems in changing environmental conditions, Holling derived two characteristics of resilience. Those are (1) the ability of a system to absorb external influences and resist them while maintaining the initial parameters and (2) the magnitude of the impacts that a system can withstand before it passes into a different state. Based on the systems approach, at the beginning of the 21st century, the concept of resilience began to be used to analyze the ability of society or social groups to deal with the consequences of natural disasters. The article shows that adaptation, i.e. the ability of people to develop and implement measures to respond to changing external conditions, and transformability, i.e. the ability of society to transform its structure and find new development trajectories, play a key role in maintaining social resilience. The conclusion is made that further understanding of the substantive and theoretical-methodological foundations of the concept of resilience is needed for its subsequent use in theoretical and applied research on ways of overcoming the consequences of global challenges,