Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2025 number 2

The article considers the general research discourse of works dealing with the philosophical and methodological problems of geological knowledge and cognition. It is shown that the philosophy of geology as one of the areas of philosophical and methodological research has been developing for a long time and until recently outside the general philosophical discourse and outside the community of philosophers. In the social and institutional sense, works on the philosophy of geology were and to a large extent now remain not so much another branch of the philosophy of science, but a certain meta-level of geologists’ understanding of their practical and theoretical experience. Today, there are already a significant number of works on the philosophy of geology, but it is highly conditional to talk about any traditions, trends, or directions with regard to this field. Works on the philosophy of geology were and for the most part remain single and conceptually poorly connected with each other. Nevertheless, the author of the article identified five key thematic areas dealing with the philosophical and methodological problems of geological knowledge and cognition; three of them relate to the Western segment of the philosophy of geology, and two to the Soviet one. The author believes that the areas considered in the article have every reason to develop into separate and full-fledged research traditions in the future. In addition, the article problematizes the subject of the philosophy of geology and examines several meanings of the concept of “geology”. As a solution to the problem of the polysemy of the concept of “geology”, the author proposes that not geology itself should be considered as the primary subject of the philosophy of geology, but geological cognition, within which all geological subdisciplines can be actualized.,