The Genesis and Evolution of the Anti-Metaphysical Trend in the Philosophy of the Modern Period

This article conceptualizes and analyzes the anti-metaphysical trend in the Western philosophical tradition. Emphasis is placed on the period when this criticism manifested itself most vividly (19th century). The basic structure of the metaphysically oriented classical Western European philosophy is reconstructed and the logic of criticism of metaphysical philosophical thinking is conceptualized in the context of cultural, historical, social, and intellectual transformations that mark the end of the modern period. It is proved that metaphysical approaches in the philosophy of the modern period began to lose their relevance due to their limitations associated with methodological settings, which assumed that all philosophical questions are produced and resolved in a clearly fixed framework of metaphysically oriented systems. Change of perception of the world of objects and understanding of the place of the person in the structure of reality led to the formation, based on various previous directions, of a regular anti-metaphysical trend in the new European philosophy in the 19th century. The rejection of the metaphysical consideration of man in an essential way allowed expanding the anthropological horizon with components that were not available to previous models. Philosophical strategies were reoriented from the unchanging and eternal to the concrete historical, from theory to practice. A new critical direction in philosophy claimed to be comprehensive in the perception of reality. At the same time, the principle of criticism was perceived not as correcting and creating, but as an instrument for the destruction of metaphysical tradition. In the 19th century, anti-metaphysical philosophical criticism became a logical continuation and implementation of anti-religious intentions of the Enlightenment; in idealism, such criticism found weaknesses due to the Western European theological background. Bringing the key provisions of the philosophy of the modern period to a logical conclusion by criticizing them, the critics of metaphysics perceived their enterprise as a concrete realization of previous humanistic attitudes.

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