Scientific School of Philosophy of Epistemocracy
and Social-Communication Strategist
Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Professor Kopylov

Scientific achievements in the field of philosophy have their own characteristics. Within the framework of educational institutions - unions, schools, academies, universities, from era to era, from century to century, there was an increase in philosophical knowledge, a deepening of its methodology and practical orientation, which became a prerequisite for the development of modern philosophical theories and concepts. Today's domestic philosophical scientific schools, which are gaining international popularity due to their in-depth understanding of certain philosophical problems, are characterized by the continuity of generations, the stability of traditions in the course of research work, the creation of a positive creative environment in which the most gifted researchers - students, graduate students, teachers - would be educated and grow professionally.

To a large extent, all this is characteristic of the scientific school of Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Honored Worker of Education of Ukraine V. O. Kopylov, which in the mid-90s of the XX century, based on socio-philosophical, communicative and political issues and research methodology of globalist consciousness in cross-cultural and transcultural processes, concentrated the efforts of many novice scientists in the field of social philosophy, political philosophy, philosophical anthropology and communication theory, liberal-democratic ideas, ideals and values.

The qualification composition of the scientific school and the topics of their scientific works:

Volodymyr Kopylov - Honored Education Worker of Ukraine, Professor, Doctor of Philosophy, Dean of the Humanities Faculty of the National Aerospace University named after M.E. Zhukovsky "KHAI". He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and has been working at the Aerospace University since 1979. It was he who, in 1996, created a humanities faculty on the basis of the aviation institute at that time, which united teaching staffs of various social and humanitarian departments. Currently, the Humanities Faculty has seven leading departments, which have quite positive feedback from students and employers: the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Law, the Department of Document Studies, the Department of Foreign Languages, the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Psychology, and the Department of Physical Education.

Paying special attention to the scientific activity and support of the young scientific potential of the Faculty of Humanities, it should be noted that Kopylov V.O. was and remains a scientific consultant to many doctoral students, post-graduate students and young scientists who successfully participate in many scientific projects of Ukraine (for example, the Regional Scientific Competition of Young Scientists "Gender Policy Through the Eyes of Ukrainian Youth", November 15, 2018) and defend theses.

Professor Kopylov V.O. was always open to scientific dialogue and educational integration, which is why he successfully completed several scientific internships, both in domestic universities and universities in America and Europe, for example, internships in the USA (University of Maryland, CollegePark) or in Germany (InformationsZentrumSozialwissenschaften, Bonn -Berlin). The result of this scientific consolidation and scientific exchange was the creation of its scientific philosophical school on the basis of already existing scientific research. It should be emphasized that this is not accidental, since Kopylov V.O. always tried to productively combine theoretical scientific developments and socio-practical activities. That is why in 2002 he created a research laboratory of sociological and psychological problems of the Higher School on the basis of the "Political Science and History" department, of which he is still the head today. In addition, in 2004, he founded the "Humanitarian Journal" - a specialized publication of scientific works that reflects a wide range of social and humanitarian problems of history, social philosophy, political science, law, anthropology, and headed its editorial board. The collection is registered in international scientific and metric systems: Index Copernicus, Google Scholar; Journals Impact Factor and others, and thorough and comprehensive studies of many domestic and foreign researchers have been published on its pages for many years in a row.

On the basis of the scientific school created by V.O. Kopylov, with the financial support of the International Renaissance Foundation, together with the Institute of Open Society (New York, Budapest) and the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, the project "Political Sciences" was developed as part of the mega-project "Higher school: leadership for progress". 

V.O. Kopylova's scientific interests: philosophy of power, philosophy of politics, history of philosophy and history of political thought, social heterogeneity, epistemocracy.

Among the galaxy of his students, the following can be noted:

1. Васильєва Людмила Анатоліївна – канд. філос. наук, доцент – «Соціально-філософська концептуалізація реклами» (2005);

2. Чмихун Світлана Євгенівна – канд. філос. наук, доцент – «Соціальне знання в інформаційно- комунікативному просторі сучасного суспільства» (2008);

3. Осипова Валерія Юріївна – канд. філос. наук – «Текстуальність як феномен соціокультурного простору сучасного суспільства» (2011);

3. Проценко Олександр Олександрович – канд. філос. наук – «Феномен підприємництва в аксіосфері суспільства» (2012) .

5. Пруднікова Олена Вікторівна – доктор філософських наук, професор – «Природа інформаційної культури у сучасному соціальному просторі: соціально-філософська концептуалізація (2015). 

Scientific direction of the school:

The main theoretical strategy of social phenomena is V.O. Kopylov. defined as attention to "permanent and transcendental relevance in the subject field of social philosophy", referring, first of all, to the phenomenon of epistemocracy (a term formed from two Greek words: "epistema" - knowledge and "kratos" - power), as forms of power through knowledge. In such an epistemocratic form, power should be based to the maximum extent precisely on knowledge, which becomes the main resource of power. This kind of interaction is the main strategy for the development of modern society, as it can bring the most stable and dynamic result. In addition, the idea of epistemocracy is especially relevant for modern democratic Ukraine, which strives for European integration and intercultural public communication. And the point here is not only in theoretical interest, but also in the practical possibilities of the Ukrainian version of epistemocracy, since the Ukrainian mentality and philosophy have always been quite close to this form of power, to a special respect for knowledge and knowledgeable people. According to Kopylov V.O. Ukraine is destined to be a great state, and the Ukrainian people to be a great nation, but in order to realize this grand idea, Ukrainians need to go through their reflective and difficult path, create their own, in this case, intellectual catalysts, realizations. It is the philosophy of power that forms the foundation of the nation's intelligence, without which there is no prosperity and well-being of the people.

The second theoretical and methodological orientation of the scientific and philosophical school of Professor V.O. Kopylov. is the mastering of socio-communicative strategies of the modern information society, understanding the essence and general patterns of functioning of the sphere of human relations, both at the level of the individual and at the level of globalization processes, understanding them in the cultural-communicative space. This scientific direction attracts the attention of researchers to the multidimensional manifestation of basic communication techniques and technologies precisely because of scientific heritage and knowledge. Such philosophical understandings of the mentioned issues are able to reveal the main problematic trends in the field of communicative interactions in the information space. They actually represent a separate scientific-theoretical matrix for understanding all cultural-communicative processes and an attempt to find a universal model of communicative-strategic survival of humanity in conditions of media oversaturation, devaluation of knowledge and informational hybrid conflict.

Basic scientific concepts of the school: 

Scientific school of philosophy of epistemocracy and socio-communicative strategists of professor V.O. Kopylov. has been operating for the last twenty years on the basis of several fundamental scientific concepts developed and implemented by him, which are oriented towards the phenomenon of epistemocracy and social-communicative strategies. Thus, in his opinion, today's determination of knowledge and power can merge together and organize a completely new socio-communicative order of human life, but for this, additional research into the mentioned issues and additional funding for its practical implementation are necessary. Yes, one of the examples of scientific analysis. Punishment from an overt and public act that demonstrated the absoluteness and invincibility of power, nowadays turns into a well-organized and calculated measure hidden from "extra eyes", which speaks not about the general humanization of modern society and the growing individualization of man, but about the emergence of the so-called new "political technology of the human body". Here, the body that was punished and tamed in the past centuries is replaced by a body that is being trained, the general formulas of domination become "disciplines" - methods that make possible more detailed control over the actions of the body, the constant subordination of its forces, the imposition of obedience-usefulness relations. It is under such conditions that the concept of a dispositif appears in the scientific school, which allows to connect together power, knowledge and real modern social practices, to establish a connection between scientific discourses of knowledge, social and political discourses of power, real practices of human life and linguistic analysis discourse texts.

Supporting the emistemocratic direction of research through the linguistic analysis of discourse texts, which was defined by V.O. Kopylov, the work of understanding social problems of society based on the methodology of postmodernism by V. Yu. Osipova appears. "Textuality as a phenomenon of the socio-cultural space of modern society" (2011), who is not only a scientist, but also a talented postmodern poet. Dissertation work of Osypova V.Yu., a graduate of Kharkiv National University named after V.N. Karazina, and later graduate students V.O. Kopylov, combined the scientific and theoretical indicators of the triad of phenomena of knowledge - information - culture. The desired theoretical interest is precisely those subsections of the candidate's dissertation, which deal with the peculiarities of the power functioning and the open representation of individual techniques in linguistic and non-linguistic manifestations of modern philosophical and cultural discourse. Such a holistic theoretical-practical study of the text as a semantic discourse of corporeality, the iconic space of fashion, mass culture, advertising product and advertising in general, proves the point of view of the doctoral student that modern humanitarian knowledge only recently realized that the relationship between the text and the socio-cultural space is not limited at all within the framework of the art of words. Arising on the border of linguistics, poetics, literary studies and semiotics, the problem of the text focuses attention precisely on the disclosure of meaning-making resources, the transformation of meaning in symbolic macro-formations, which is accompanied by the recognition of the incorrectness or insufficiency of denotations. Evaluating the scientific novelty of Osipova V.Yu., it should be said that she revealed the status of such categories as "text" and "textuality" not only in the philosophical-categorical apparatus of modern philosophy, but also in the literary-critical process and communicative models of culture. It is in them that "the language of discourse, knowledge, as if the figures themselves are formed, desirable or undesirable to the authorities, and at the same time, the authorities form the forms and relations foreseen by specific knowledge" (V.O. Kopylov). In addition, research by Osipova V.Yu. is based on extensive cultural, philosophical and historical empirical material, which was not previously introduced into the space of philosophical interpretations. The author states that in the study of the artistic specificity of the art of the word and the regularities of its national-historical development, an important role belongs to the study of poetry, which is an integral part of poetics, in which it is through the means of poetic analysis that one can deeply and subtly understand the artistic form of poetic works in its specific content. V.Yu Osypova, being a practicing poetess and having evaluated all the scientific recommendations of her scientific supervisor V.O. Kopylov, emphasizes that the disclosure of the nature of poetry should be approached not so much through its code, language, but through a certain sphere of human existence - the emotionality of the poetic text has to be defined, first of all, by the subject that is mastered by poetry and the formal aspects of poetic texts, which, in fact, distinguish it from prose, should not be neglected.

An important direction of the scientific school of V.O. Kopylov is an analysis of the communicative orientation of social knowledge and the unity of informational and communicative theory and practice, as evidenced by a number of dissertation studies under his supervision. Such research, which would demonstrate the unity of theory and practice in the concepts of philosophical thought, was the candidate's dissertation work of a graduate of the National Aerospace University named after M.E. L.A. Zhukovsky Vasylieva "Social-philosophical conceptualization of advertising", who, after graduating from the technical faculty with a red diploma, showed great interest in social-philosophical issues, which resulted in numerous scientific publications and participation in numerous international scientific conferences (Austria, Canada, Hungary, USA) and an internship in Lublin Maria Curie-Skladowska University (Lublin, Republic of Poland, topic: "Education in the field of political science, sociology, history and philosophy").

Under the leadership of Kopylov V.O. graduate student L.A. Vasilieva in her work, she fully revealed the essential nature of the phenomenon of advertising as one of the socio-communicative strategies of modern society, comprehensively understood the characteristics, signs of the phenomenon of advertising, comparing it with such phenomena as propaganda, agitation, mass culture, glamor, brand. It has been proven that interprofessional advertising activity is actively included in the formation of a new information space regarding the realization of the social needs of broad segments of the population, and against this background, the globalization of advertising technologies is increasingly clearly observed in the processes of creative exploration of the world, consumption of cultural values, and the formation of socio-cultural contents of society. The main goal of L.A. Vasylieva's dissertation research. was the conceptual and analytical understanding of advertising as a multidimensional social phenomenon. The specified goal was fully disclosed by the dissertation student. The work first developed the foundations of the socio-philosophical concept of the phenomenon of advertising, objectively revealing its essence in three interrelated aspects. The first contains ontological parameters that fix advertising as a historically developing object that represents a dynamic and complex social-communicative system of society. The second aspect contains epistemological parameters, and above all, the study of the object "advertising" within the limits of philosophical reflection, where the definition of advertising as a mediator of the information and communication space is formulated. The third section of socio-philosophical analysis is axiological, which reveals the functioning of advertising in the dialogic and tolerant space of society. In addition, the author clarified the meaning of the concepts "advertising creativity", "advertising communication", "advertising product" and their significance in understanding the phenomenon of advertising as a whole. The proposition that the axiological content of modern advertising communication is revealed in society by a spiritual-value paradigm is substantiated, and the nature of contradictory evaluations of the advertising object is determined, as well as the reasons for the negative attitude towards advertising by various social subjects. Vasylieva L.A. in the work notes that a true advertising product (which is distinguished by a high artistic level, uniqueness, author's position and universal purpose, created in the conditions of a creative and creative act) claims the role of a work of art and is able to integrate aesthetics and rationality, beauty and utility, comic and practical, to form an aesthetic taste, which allows us to consider advertising as a specific type of synthetic art.

The study of the genesis of the idea of the interaction of power and knowledge conditioned the appeal to social knowledge as an independent and important phenomenon in the information and communication space of modern society. Thus, there was an independent study "Social knowledge in the information and communication space of modern society" (2008) Chmykhun S.E. - the leading experienced teacher of the Department of Law of the National Aerospace University named after M.E. Zhukovsky. She, making up the conceptual idea of V.O. Kopylov. regarding the need for the absolute unity of knowledge and power, where the main principles are immanence, continuity of variations, double conditionality and polyvalence of discourses, in his dissertation expands the list of basic functions and characteristics of social knowledge. For the first time, the dissertation student proposed a systematic explication model of social knowledge, which simultaneously gives an idea of its nature, essence and specificity, determined by its differentiated social activity, goal setting and communication as universal ways of human interaction. Chmykhun S.E. gives the author's definition of social knowledge as stable, integrated into the system of information about society, which consists of a complex of indicators of processes taking place in society, as well as events, facts, phenomena of spiritual life associated with the joint activities of people. Under the leadership of Kopylov V.O. now she is actively working on a new monograph on the topic "The phenomenon of coercion in social communication options".

In addition, Chmykhun S.E. implementing her scientific achievements in pedagogical and practical activities, she was for a long time the coordinator of the All-Ukrainian competition of student works in political science, history and law. Her students-pupils took prize places in many competitions several years in a row. Currently, Chmyhun S.E. holds the position of academic secretary of the National Aerospace University named after M.E. Zhukovsky, but actively continues to act as a scientific consultant for many student scientific projects. She is the author of more than 20 scientific and educational works.

On the basis of the scientific developments of the school of V.O. Kopylov, it becomes obvious that in the transformational transformations taking place in the modern world, the problems associated with the active activity of the social subject in the conditions of globalization with the optimization of the entire system of social and communicative relations are of great importance . That is why the research strategy of dissertation studies under the leadership of V.O. Kopylov. has a significant difference - the systematic nature of the issues raised. Moreover, they emphasize not only the main, titular problem, but also its contexts. An example of such a presentation can be considered the dissertation research of O.O. Protsenko. - "Entrepreneurship in the axiolosphere of society." As a leading economist, banker and entrepreneur, he could see from personal experience the main demand for effective business communication and communication. The purpose of his dissertation research was to identify the axiological orientation of entrepreneurship and, on the basis of the essential characteristics of this phenomenon, to represent it in the socio-cultural space of the modern information society. Protsenko O.O. on the basis of an interdisciplinary approach, investigated the value-content variability of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in its main elements such as innovations and innovations, success, risk and play, as constants of the practically-oriented activity of a social subject. Thus, it is emphasized in the work that the philosophical analysis of entrepreneurship is addressed to a single system of those problems that are connected with the struggle of man for his existence, the promising state of society in the conditions of globalization, the life of people in the conditions of the market economy, riskogenic and crisis situations, the development of ways to overcome them . Protsenko O.O. considers modern communication techniques updated by the entrepreneurial ethos, the author refers to them the process of creating reputation and image. Attention is drawn not to the fact that innovations and innovations in entrepreneurship depend on the circulation of information within individual communities, on the ways of using this information and its beneficial application. In addition, the diversity of social relationships in which entrepreneurship is involved exists due to the presence of opposite tendencies that determine their development and change: necessity and contingency, possibility and reality, uncertainty and certainty. Revealing the objective state of the social processes of a transforming society, uncertainty endows entrepreneurial activity with a tendency to develop, which accumulates such phases of its deployment as the presence of an alternative choice, conditioned by a situation of uncertainty, decision-making based on preferences and a set of actions on deeds that correspond to the adopted decision.

The research interest in the information and communication space of modern society was connected with the work on the doctoral dissertation "The nature of information culture in the modern social space: socio-philosophical conceptualization" with an in-depth analysis of information culture by O. V. Prudnikova, whose scientific consultant was also Kopylov V. .AT. In this doctoral dissertation, the socio-philosophical conceptualization, nature, essence and functioning of information culture at the social and personal levels was given for the first time. All the main results of the doctoral dissertation were published in many scientific specialized publications of Ukraine and scientific periodicals, which are included in international scientific databases, for example:

1. Пруднікова О.В. Інформаційна культура в контексті інформаційного етапу розвитку соціального буття / Пруднікова О.В. // Вісник Національного університету «Юридична академія України імені Ярослава Мудрого». Серія Філософія, філософія права, політологія, соціологія. Х., 2013, №4 (18), С. 33-40.

2. Прубдікова О.В. Культура як інформаційно-комунікативна система: системно-синергетичний вимір / Вісник Національного університету «Юридична академія України імені Ярослава Мудрого». Серія Філософія, філософія права, політологія, соціологія. Х., 2013, №13 (17), С. 54-64.

3. Пруднікова О.В. Детермінанти розвитку інформаційної культури українського соціуму / Пруднікова О.В. // Психолого-педагогічні та політичні проблеми у трансформаційних процесах українського суспільства: матеріали Всеукраїнської науково-практичної конференції. К.: КрНУ, 2014, С. 188-190 та ін. 

The theoretical and methodological conclusions obtained in the course of the dissertation research allow for a deeper understanding of the problem of reorientation of the cognitive strategy of modern science, aimed at the integration of humanitarian and sociological knowledge in the direction of research into the role of information culture in the conditions of the formation of an information society. Here, information culture is considered as a three-dimensional universal form of civilization, which consists in the dialectical unity of the information infrastructure as a system that allows a person to receive the necessary information at the right time and in the right place; multimedia as a system of information mechanisms; meta-education, that is, the formation of a person's understanding of his place in the world.

Detailing the author's concept of information culture on the example of Ukrainian society, it is proved that the main characteristics of the national cultural space (tolerance, polyethics, dialogicity) are the foundations of the democratic development of the information culture of Ukrainian society. However, compared to the achievements of developed Western countries, the state of domestic information culture is characterized by a number of problems. It is affected by such negative factors as the lack of transparency of the media market, the attempts of the subjects of the political process to influence the activities of the mass media with the help of administrative resources, violations of the current legislation by civil servants, and the dominance of mass culture. Overcoming these negative trends has undeniable relevance in the aspect of establishing democratic values of information culture in modern Ukraine.

Considering the scientific and pedagogical potential of V.O. Kopylov. it should be noted that another important direction of his activity is the review of scientific monographs, articles, manuals, among which definitely those prepared by his students. It is because of them that every head of any scientific school certifies himself as a specialist in a separate problem area of social knowledge.

A recent (2019) monograph by L.A. Vasylieva can be a vivid example of this trend. "The public person in the cultural-communicative space of modernity", which deepens the scientific and theoretical issues and expands them from the perspective of changes in society and social philosophy. Thus, the identification and study of theoretical ideas regarding the concept of publicity in domestic and Western philosophical and anthropological directions allows us to consider the phenomenon of publicity as a universal consolidated worldview matrix of the cultural-communicative space. Under the leadership of V.O. Kopylova, the author clarified the modern concept of publicity on the basis of a comparative analysis of historical definitions and provided her own interpretation of this concept: publicity is an artificially created social and communicative reality, which is oriented towards successful personal representation and social representation of individual and personal contents in the discursive field thanks to techniques and technologies in certain manifestations of culture. In this sense, the use of the terms "public sphere", "public space" in the research is justified from the point of view of politics, communication, human somatic being, etc. L.A. Vasylieva it is proven that each historical era had its own idea of the phenomenon of publicity, which depended on those socio-political conditions that dominated in a specific period. The values and principles of secular publicity coincide and change together with the transformation of the understanding of the nature of a public person and his place in the cultural-communicative field of culture. At the same time, the concept of new information publicity is represented as a qualitatively new consolidating formation that replaces the closed, material, bourgeois culture. Its main features are openness, fragmentation, liberation, pluralism, destruction of the centralized structure, eclecticism, irony, parody, self-reflexivity, kitsch.

Considerable attention is paid to the anthropological component of understanding the phenomenon of publicity. In the work of Vasilyeva L.A. proves that the intersubjective world arises only in the case of projection, when the subject sees himself in the Other, and in the case of identification, when he finds the Other in himself. The modern subject of public communication, which tries to openly declare itself, is a linguistic and communicative personality, which, on the one hand, includes individuals, and on the other hand, it has to give up its uniqueness in order to be part of a certain collective whole. Publicity as a space "between" does not finally "dissolve" in a separate ontological basis, but is the basis of the formation of the "I": only co-participation in the existence of other beings reveals the meaning and foundations of one's own existence, only the development of openness, which requires considerable effort, is capable of forming successful self-identification of a public person. At the same time, the loss of the practices of subjectivity threatens the immersion of the human "I" in collectivity (for example, the Condorcet paradox), which completely dissolves it, while removing the issue of personal responsibility for actions that, under the conditions of modern technologies, already have catastrophic consequences. A public person in the modern public information space forms separate forms of a kind of mass personality cult - excessive self-praise, self-deprecation, self-presentation. Such behavior should be regarded as a desire for personal self-discovery, self-expression or as a desire to satisfy one's own "Ego", to present oneself as a commodity on the "personality market".

Turning to the epistemological direction of the scientific school of V.O. Kopylov, she emphasizes that information-public interactions, as the basis of political discourse, in modern conditions acquire a universal character, become a highly operative sphere of response, a resource of human attention and civic responsibility. In this manifestation, publicity demonstrates a special variant of political compromise, social forecasting, and integrated impersonal invariance that ensure the functioning of new forms of social knowledge.