What is the nature of science? What are the factors conditioning it? Where lies the boundary between science and the sphere of everyday experience, mythological-poetical, artistic-symbolic thinking, morality, religion, and other areas of the social super-structure? These highly topical issues are discussed in the present volume in the context of a comprehensive discourse on ancient and contemporary science. The authors have closely studied the general and particular criteria of scientificity, the origin of science from pre-scientific forms of knowledge, and the dynamics of scientific rationality at the various stages of mankind’s history.

Typology of knowledge is worked out, scientific types are round analysis of the phenomenon of science as a specific type of conceptual processing of reality, one that is subject to autonomous laws of development and self-change.