Social Philosophy Today

Volume 17, 2001

Communication, Conflict, and Reconciliation

Toward a New Paradigm in Social Philosophy

The new social reality of the end of twentieth century has created the need to reexamine our social theories. This paper is devoted to the methodological and theoretical aspects of a new paradigm for social philosophy. The author formulates the main features of the paradigm: restricted rationalism, pluralism, variability, multi-dimensionality, stochasticity, the human dimension of social processes, alternativity, non-predictability, catastrophicity, and self-organization. The author then uses the methodological tools of this paradigm to reconstruct and examine the socio-cultural reality in post-communist Ukraine.