Study of Soviet and Russian Philosophy of Science and Technology in China

Chinese research on the philosophy of science and technology in Russia (and the Soviet Union) has gone through three stages: 1) “taking the Soviet Union as its teacher”; 2) “viewing the Soviet Union as an enemy”; 3) “using Russia as a reference”. After the collapse of the USSR, research fell silent for a while, but in recent years there has been a trend towards their revival. In the 1960s, a group of reform-minded philosophers proposed a very instructive interpretation of the philosophy of science centered on epistemological centrism. At the beginning of the 21st century, new development trends appeared in Russian philosophy of science and technology, such as pluralism, the theory of sociocultural context and humanism, while a philosophical paradigm of science and technology with Russian specifics was formed, especially the turn in technological philosophy. In China, Russian-Soviet philosophical research of science and technology developed over decades, resulting in the formation of three generations of academic leaders in the person of Gong Yuzhi, Sun Mutyan and Wan Changsun. The main result of their work was a trilogy of works, which is based on “Traces of History”, “Mind in Search” and “Search at a Fork in the Road”. The trilogy shows how the philosophy of science and technology in Russia completed the role change under the guidance of Marxist philosophy and gradually moved to the research path of combining internationalization and localization, while facing the need to solve the problem of marginalization of disciplines and theoretical innovations.