The Concept of Position and Positional Thinking

The paper elaborates on and develops the concept of “position”. Drawing on the examples from the history of science and philosophy from G. Galileo to the works of the Moscow Methodological Circle in the second half of the 60s - early 70s of the 19th century the author considers the cultural phenomenon of positional thinking. Special attention is paid to the philosophy of I.G. Fichte. An assumption is made and substantiated that Fichte’s dialectics is a model of specifically positional thinking and provides a basis for determining the objective content of the concept of “position”. The paper also describes the context of the emergence of positional schemes, their specific structure and use in the works of MMK as a normative-logical apparatus, an alternative to formal logic. It also outlines the area of topical problems associated with the concept of “position”.

position, positional thinking, observer, point of view, activity, self-determination, unit, isolation, positional scheme, reflection, experimentation, Galileo, Kant, Fichte, Marx, Moscow Methodological Circle, MMC