by Oleg YANITSKY, Dr. Sc. (Philos.), RAS Institute of Sociology (Moscow)
The 150th birth anniversary of our great countryman Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, will be marked in March of 2013 both in Russia and in the world. Besides, UNESCO called 2013 the "Year of Vernadsky". By now dozens of books and hundreds of papers are written, in which specialists review contribution of the scientist to geochemistry, crystallography, soil science, geography and other Earth sciences. But the surprising thing is that his activities in the field of social science, history and methodology of science and finally his thoughts as politician and public figure are not at all out of date. On the contrary, today they are more topical.
VERNADSKY-FOUNDER OF CONTEMPORARY GLOBALISM
Quite explainable interest of national scientists in Ver-nadsky's ideas in the field of biosphere and noosphere pressed somewhat back studies of his works in social science in the 1960s-1990s. However, significance of the latter is enormous and not only of those, which are well known to the Russian reader (I mean, first of all, his publicistic articles printed by Nauka Publishers in 1995), but also a great number of thoughts, which become available to us with each new volume of his "Diaries".
Today that part of Vernadsky's heritage is especially topical, which can be called "Vernadsky's ethos" or, speaking in modern phraseology, "dominant world view". It is just worldview as a whole because, according to our deep conviction, Vernadsky was the founder of globalism as a theory and method of human history cognition long before the appearance of its contemporary theorists. Vernadsky called science as a whole "a planetary phenomenon", which is indissolubly connected with the life of the whole mankind and biosphere, its environment. He wrote: "For the first time man has actually realized
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that he is a resident of the planet and can-m ...
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