Cognitive Models and the Formation of Religious Institutions:
the Ancient Protognosticism
DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2002.05.10
Sergeyev K.V. Cognitive Models and the Formation of Religious Institutions: the Ancient Protognosticism . – Polis. Political Studies. 2002. No. 5. https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2002.05.10
In the presented article, an attempt is made to explain the fact well known in literature on history of philosophy: the absence of even a minimally institutionalized variant of gnosticism, although this teaching itself, created in archaic Greece by early pre-Socratics in the form of the so-called protognosticism was widely used as a cognitive model in different historical epochs. The article contains argumentation of the thesis that the gnostic paradigm, being the result of individual and not collective reflection, emerges as a way to comprehend the crisis of the dominant cosmogony paradigm, and therefore needs neither socialization, nor institutionalization.