Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2025 number 4

Introduction. The study is devoted to the analysis of the Russian idea in education, the main philosophical and ontological approaches affecting the general structure and content of education are investigated. Methodology. The study applies socio-cultural and civilizational approaches in the perspective of comparative analysis of the philosophical and ontological foundations of Western and Russian education. Discussion. The philosophical and ontological foundations of modern knowledge were formed from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Philosophical and ontological approaches, developed mainly by Western civilization by the mid-nineteenth century, were taken as the basis. This is the postulation of the two main alternative foundations of the world - unilateral (partial) materialism and idealism, which are realized, first of all, in the teachings of religious idealism and scientific materialism. Materialism was identified with science in the aspect of the bodily or material atomic-molecular basis of the world. And the comprehension of the immaterial world - spiritual and moral, became the prerogative of idealistic and religious comprehension. The Russian scientist A. A. Bogdanov was the first to publish a fundamental work on the general theory of systems, laying the philosophical and ontological foundations of systemic philosophy as a holistic, non-disjointed knowledge about the world, about systems of any nature - inorganic, organic, social, spiritual. The opposition between materialism and idealism was overcome and the whole knowledge was restored as the unity of the World. This direction of the ideas of Russian philosophy as a whole knowledge about the world in the twentieth century acquired a philosophical and ontological form of systemic philosophy as synthetic dualism. These two different civilizational philosophical and ontological concepts - Western and Russian - formed the basis of the specifics of natural-scientific, socio-humanitarian, anthropic and technical-technological knowledge, which laid different foundations for education - dismembered knowledge of the universal in Western ontology and whole complementary knowledge in the Russian worldview. Conclusion. It is stated that there are alternative philosophical and ontological concepts of being - Western (partial, internally dismembered, conflicting) and Russian (holistic, internally unified, harmonious).