Modern landscape science before the challenges of Postmodernism
Authors: Tyutyunnik Yulian 
Published: February 2024

Purpose of the article: to determine the distinctive features of the subject of research, methodology and method of landscape studies in the state of transition from late Modern to early Postmodern (late 20th – early 21st century).

Research methodology: historical and cultural analysis with the involvement of hermeneutics, philosophical comparative studies.

Results. The research objects specific to postmodern landscape science are characterized: ambivalent, socially devastated, camp landscapes, anti-landscapes, landscapeoids. It is pointed out the complexity nature of the research subject of modern and future landscape science, in particular, such research phenomena as the landscape nature of subjectivity; the immanence of contradiction, paradox and absurdity in a complexity geosystem; and also on virtual landscape reality as a product of artificial intelligence. New philosophical and methodological approaches – multiculturalism and multihistoricism – are proposed.

Scientific novelty: for the first time in the Ukrainian-language scientific geographical and philosophical literature, an attempt has been made to analyze the current and potential features of landscape science in the Postmodern era.

Today, landscape science is in a state of transition to a new historical stage – the Postmodern era. This transition is not a “scientific revolution” in the sense of T. Kuhn, but is coupled with more profound changes that touch the very foundations of rational world perception, scientific world explanation and goal setting in the field of scientific activity – changes that have an existential and metaphysical nature, changes that associated with the transformations of the historical process on a global scale. Areas of study of landscape objects and phenomena, which were methodologically, epistemologically, and existentially inaccessible to the scientific thought of the New Age, the Modern Era, and landscape studies of the 20th century are becoming very popular. were mostly ignored. Actual and future transformations in the methodology of landscape science are also related to the introduction of paradox, contradiction, and absurdity into the scientific discourse. One of the cornerstone and already clearly visible empirical challenges to modern landscape science is the formation of virtual landscape reality. Postmodern landscape science is characterized by a movement towards the assimilation of metaphysical and discursive systems of non-European cultures of mankind (for example, the category of “Delusions” of the indigenous Australian aboriginal civilization). It should also get rid of the new European supremacy in relation to the methods of scientific and quasi-scientific world explanation by European discourses from antiquity to the 16th century. Examples here can be turning to Pythagorean numerology (O.K. Cherkashin) or the so-called eniogeography (G.I. Shvebs) when studying the landscape. As a result, profound future shifts in the landscape scientific discourse will not be dialectical, but fundamental metaphysical in nature. Perhaps this will force a person to radically reconsider his place and his own role in the landscape envelope and in history.

Practical significance. A number of unusual, to some extent unusual, methodological approaches to the further development of landscape science in the 21st century have been proposed, with the fact that the very concept of development must be fundamentally rethought in all respects, primarily existential and ecological.