Bulletin de l'Académie Internationale CONCORDE, 2019, N 1
"It still remains a scandal to philosophy... that the existence of things outside of us must be accepted merely by faith and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof." [1]. Hume claimed that if we see a vase on the table it does not mean it really exists. What undoubtedly exists in this case is our visual perception of it. [2] After Kant’s and Hume's era rationalistic theories (classical rationalism of Descartes, Pascal and Beckon, pragmatism, Marxism, etc.) seized a leading part in epistemology. I will name them the classical rationalism. The common idea of these theories is the assumption of absolute adequacy of our cognition for reality. For example, such declarations of one of the founders of pragmatism Charles S. Pierce are well known: "There is no distinction of meaning so fine as consist, but a possible difference of practice", or "when one knows how an object will react to experimental handling one has achieved a clear idea of that object." [3]. Marxism asserts that our cognition merely reflects the reality, reflects it correctly and does it in such a fashion that a subsequent knowledge does not abolish the previous one, but supplements it and so on. Of course, representatives of classical rationalism were acquainted with the skeptic problems of Kant. Hume, and others, and they agree with the theoretical impossibility of proving the existence of the objective reality. But they proceeded from the second part of the impossibility, namely from the impossibility of proving the negative - the nonexistence of the objective reality. They claimed that the experience of human activity as a whole and the experience of the rapidly developing science and technology in particular confirms both the existence of the objective reality and the ability of our cognition to describe casual connections between its phenomena correctly. But one day it became evident that Newton’s model of the universe, underlying the success of science and technology in that period was limited in its application: Michelson's experiments demonstrated that the speed of light contradicted Newton’s mechanics. This contradiction was explained only by Einstein on the basis of his new model. Einstein's model was not a special case of Newton’s that would permit inclusion of the new facts science discovered. It gave a qualitatively different picture of the universe. Space and time that were absolute in all their infinite in Newton’s model, appeared to be relative in Einstein's. The speed of light which in Newton's model could be relative and determined differently in different systems of coordinate, turned out in Einstein's one to be absolute and independent of coordinate system, etc. For the rationalistic world outlook, it was a shock. It became clear and was indisputably proved that our cognition is not an absolutely adequate reflection of reality and 19