Master's Degree Program: Annotations of Academic Disciplines
Olessia Kirtchik, Grigory Yudin
SOCIO-HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE
Social studies of economic knowledge are a relatively new, yet actively developing research area borrowing from sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy. This space of international and interdisciplinary dialogue emerged as a reaction to a growing influence of economy and economic knowledge in modern societies. Sociology of economics aims to promote a critical view of dominant economic (both scientific and common) representations, to reveal philosophical and anthropological premises of a modern economic theory, to analyze political and ethical aspects of economic phenomena and science. The main objective of the course consists to propose a holistic approach to the analysis of the socio-historical context of development of economic knowledge, of the place of economic phenomena in a modern society, and of effects of the expansion of the “economic” in other domains of society. The thematic plan of the course comprises lectures and seminars focused on the critical reconstructions of (neo-)liberal modernity by K. Polanyi and M. Foucault, on the main approaches to the analysis of relations between economy and culture, on the methodological debate inside the economics and its relation to other social sciences, as well as on the performativity of economic knowledge. By completing a course, every student is supposed to realize a case-study of an economic technology of his or her choice influencing the economic or political reality.
Igor Danilevsky, Evgeny Akeliev
HISTORICAL TEXTUAL CRITICISM
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the theoretical and practical basics of textual criticism as a discipline auxiliary to history. In contrast to the classical (philological) textual criticism, focused on the choice of text to serve as a basis for publications, historical textual criticism seeks to identify all the stages of the text formation — from its conception to the final stage of its creation — to give a general description of a given historical source, and thereby create a basis for adequate understanding of the text. The course structure includes both theoretical and practical sections. The theoretical section implies the study of theoretical and methodological foundations of textual analysis: general concepts of historical textual criticism (text, manuscript, piece of composition, editorial changes, original and copy, forgery, exemplar, archetype, attribution of a text, author, scribe, textual analysis, discrepancies, genetic criticism, avant-text, genetic files, etc.), the impact of the results of textual analysis on the understanding of a source, identifying its social functions, the use of data and methods of textual criticism in source study and historical research. The practical section consists in introducing to the skills of classical textual analysis, as well as assembling genetic files, identifying avant-text, author’s scope of reading and the structure of retrospective data, and to the general description of a historical source.
Petr Rezvykh, Boris Knorre, Oleg Voskoboynikov
TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE IN HISTORICAL RETROSPECTIVE
In modern world it is mostly Social Studies that shape social opinions and ideas. However the role of symbolic presentation and reception shouldn’t be underestimated in this sphere. It is evident when we deal with pre-modern societies which didn’t know any humanities at all, but it’s usually less obvious as far as modern social mentality is concerned. Symbolic universalia have a considerable impact on both mass and professional types of social knowledge. The lecture course gives a systematic survey of unscientific types of knowledge that frame a social reality, e.g. archaic mythology and specific types of knowledge – religion, philosophy, ideology, and art. Each of them is presented in two dimensions – as professional ‘high’ type of knowledge and a ‘popular’, half-professional so to say, the representatives of which may be often identified as professionals, working in popular genres of religion, philosophy, science, literature or art. Students are going to learn about the sources of mass types of knowledge (ideas, images), complicated shaping processes, the correlation of professional data and social stereotypes, and analyze the problem of professional influence on mass worldview.
HISTORY OF NATURAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE CONTEXT OF CULTURAL AND PRACTICAL ACTIVITY
Faced with the necessity of analysing events of modern and post-modern history, a researcher often has to appreciate social consequences of reasons unknown or obscure to him, which is a wrong approach. Social relationships and dynamics are largely determined by the state of minds and by the socially relevant Weltanschauung. After the Scientific Revolution of the 17th c. the central concept of European Weltanschauung has come to be the notion of nature/natural. Its influence was crucial for many social theories like natural theology or theory of natural law. Historians, however, tend to ignore the ideas of nature peculiar to the period. These ideas were equally important to the development of machinery, often styled Second nature during the 17th c., to the evolution of art and to the major part of political planning. The main aim of the proposed course is to readjust this situation by giving a short and schematic overview of the most striking features of scientific theories and technical achievements.
Forced by the formulated task and by the limit of time dedicated to the course, we focus our attention on the moments of most quick and principal changes in dominating scientific theories (paradigms) or on the prepared technical innovations – in other words, on the moments of scientific or technological revolutions. Leaving apart a couple of pure cases, the first cannot be strictly distinguished from the second, as soon as a technical innovation is prepared only when new theories spread sufficiently, while new theories tend to derive from technical achievements. Thus steam engines spread in England very quickly after their appearance, stimulating the industrial revolution, while the first attempts to introduce them in Russia and Cuba were completely unsuccessful. A different example is the new astronomy based on technical achievements allowing to produce first metallic precision instruments and later first optical devices.
The course is organised so as to give each topic a separate consideration. In addition to an overview of the main ideas peculiar to a given scientific or technological revolution, the students will hear about its most important social consequences and most typical transformations of scientific and technological institutions. The period covered by the topics spreads from the time of Pythagoras to the appearance of first semiconductor devices in the 20th c.
SCIENTIFIC TEXT STRUCTURE
The major purpose of the course is to study different ways of arranging and presenting scientific text in different national traditions. It is intended to modify the traditional scheme of academic writing conceived as an imitative reception of definite technical skills by adding historical and theoretical dimension to the scientific text. The course is divided into theoretical and practical parts. Theoretical one aims at studying structures of scientific text in Anglo-Saxon, French, German, Italian academic writings, specific features of scientific text compared to fiction and periodical literature, evolution of genres and forms of scientific literature in pre-Modern and Modern times, stylistic and rhetoric features of scientific text. Practical part deals with scientific vocabulary and syntax, ways of formatting the text with a special focus on the systems of references, ways of interpreting and summarizing scientific texts belonging to different genres. At the end of the course the students are required to write a scientific text: article, review or summary.
HISTORY OF PRE-MODERN SCIENCE
The major aim of the course is to study the evolution of principles and elements of European scientific thinking from Antiquity to Modern Times with special focus on the history of human disciplines (hermeneutics, philology, historiography) and pre-modern scientific institutions. The distinctive characteristic of the course is the break with anachronistic projection of contemporary disciplinary field (presupposing, e. g., a harsh demarcation between human and natural sciences) upon pre-modern science. The subject will be taught in a larger theoretical context: students will get familiar with main methods and fields of research in the contemporary historiography of pre-modern science.
HISTORY OF HISTORICAL SCIENCE
The introductory part of the course makes students familiar with different meanings of the term “historiography”; it deals with the emergence of theoretical dimension of that concept intended as a history of historical science – scientific discipline which is a part of intellectual history. Contemporary ways of thinking the subject matter of history are analyzed in a larger interdisciplinary field; historiography is explored as a common ground for theory of science, history of culture and social history. The first part of the course presupposes also the study of methods and sources of historical science.
The main part of the course aims at retracing the growth of scientific historical knowledge – from archaic forms of knowledge of the past till the 18th – 19th cc. development of history into autonomous scientific discipline with specific methods and fixing the stages of historical science in the 19th – 21st cc.
The major aim of the course presupposes that MA students learn the main tendencies of the development of historical science; acquire the habits of historical analysis and understanding of different schools of historical thought as well as basic ethical principles of scientific community. Considerable part of the course is dedicated to workshops, introducing the students to the central historical writings of different epochs.
SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
As it is stated in the title, the idea of the course is to examine the question of "knowledge" from a sociological point of view; it aims at the investigation of the systematic relationship of thoughts/ideas/sense and society.
The main point of the course is not so much the precision of the “character and forms of knowledge” per se, but rather depicting the modes of social production and re-production of knowledge, particularly – the modes of achievement of everyday, practical, “taken-for-granted” knowledge. According to this point the Sociology of Knowledge will be considered in the context of difference between two main knowledge aspects – mundane/ordinary/practical knowledge and scientific/expert one. This shift in emphasis makes the course issues different from the relevant stuff of the courses on the “History of ideas”, “Sociology of science”, “Cognitive sociology”, “Sociology of the everyday life”, and alike.
The course will draw special attention not only to the social determinants of “knowledge” production, but also to the outcomes of the unintended/intersubjective/collective structuration of knowledge. In modern society, institutionally manufactured knowledge and what we know are often synonymous. This tells us a lot about how we, as a society, construct, interpret and view "reality."
How do we come to create and know “knowledge”? What is “knowledgeability”? Are there different "knowledges" and "ways of knowing?" If so, how are they created ? How do we know that what we know is true or false? And how do we know what we don’t know? What is relationship between everyday knowledge and expert (scientific) knowledge? In what way expert communities, and the relationships inside those communities producing scientific knowledge, affect the ordinary conceptions of “reality”? How the ordinary knowledge of experts affects their production of scientific knowledge? What is the relationship between knowledge and power, knowledge and morality, knowledge and belief? How social institutions influence the production, arrangement and presentation of "information"? Finally, how do we distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge? These are some of the questions covered in the course.
THEORY AND HISTORY OF CULTURE
The aim of this course is to give a general idea of the world culture development dynamics focused on European culture. Main stages of world culture, laws of epoch and paradigm shifts, types of cultural activities and features of spiritual value system of each epoch are being considered. Special attention is paid to the history of culturological thinking, particularly to the development of culturological ideas in Russian cultural studies. At the same time the course presupposes singling out particular cultural phenomena (first of all the phenomenon of knowledge and its institutional objectivizations) for a more detailed analysis disclosing the laws of coexistence of a cultural fact with other social phenomena, its internal structure, the mechanism of its creation and transmission. One of the main aims of the course is to attempt at modeling culture-historical types as epochs of civilisational development.
See also: Master’s degree program “History of knowledge in comparative perspective”