SOUL IN PHILOSOPHICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS OF G. CHELPANOV

Abstract

This article is devoted to the philosophical and psychological approaches of G. Chelpanov in the problem field of understanding the essence and nature of the soul. On the analysis basis of the Ukrainian scientist’s works, the peculiarity of the connection between the mental and the physical, the psychic and the physical is traced, and the role and interdependence of philosophy and psychology in the study of the problems of the soul are determined in this article. The peculiarity of the reorientation of the national philosophical thought to the questions of anthropological and ontological nature, which were consistent with the methodological shift of the world philosophy of the twentieth century are investigated. The peculiarity of psychology as philosophical and experimental science, the main task of which the thinker reduces to the definition of the laws of mental phenomena and mental life is highlighted. The phenomenon of the soul is elaborated from the position of G. Chelpanov’s empirical parallelism. In this context, the soul is regarded as a substantive (spiritual) basis of personality, a substance, a carrier of all spiritual states, which determines their combination into a single integrity and provides personal self-identity. After all, the personality can not in any case be a simple combination of individual phenomena and states of the psyche, because they are ensured by the existence of the integrity of mental life, which is the basis of human existence. The article substantiates that the strengthening in philosophical and psychological studies in the problem of the soul leads to new variants of the interaction of science and religion and an appeal to centuries-old religious and moral experience. The article concludes that the conceptualization of G. Chelpanov’s dominant soul in his «philosophy of psychology» provides an essential basis for the formation of a new level of psychological science within the framework of the relationship between psychology and philosophy and largely determines the ways of development of contemporary humanitarianism