the first book of the Pentateuch, presenting the mythological conception of the ancient Hebrews about the creation of the universe, the earth, and mankind (in many ways closer to the conceptions of several other peoples of the ancient Near East), as well as the legendary ancient history of the Jews. The canonical Hebrew text of Genesis that has come down to us is divided into 50 chapters. The Russian name of the book (Bytie) is derived from its name in the Greek translation, genesis (kosmu), which literally means origin (of the world); in the original the book is called Bereshit (literally, in the beginning), from the opening word of the book. The version of the book that has come down to us was put together in the fifth century B.C.
a philosophical category designating the emergence, origin, or coming into being of a developing phenomenon.
Originally the category of genesis was applied to notions of the origin of nature and being. This use of the category was first reflected in mythology (which regarded gods as the source of the origin of the cosmos) and later in philosophy and the concrete branches of knowledge, including the Kant-Laplace cosmogonal hypothesis and C. Darwin’s theory of the origin of species. In the 19th century the category of genesis began to play an important methodological role in knowledge. Hegel in particular makes it the foundation of the phenomenological analysis of consciousness, which aims to reveal the coming into being of science in general, that is, of knowledge (Soch., vol. 4, Moscow, 1959, p. 14). This category became especially important in the sciences studying the processes of development. This led to the establishment of the genetic method as a special method of knowledge and even to the appearance of special branches of science, such as genetic psychology and genetic sociology. Beginning with the late 19th century, the genetic method encountered the opposition of the structural and functional method of study of an object (as in the Swiss linguist F. de Saussure’s idea of synchronic and diachronic linguistics), as well as of functionalism and structuralism in anthropology and sociology (represented, among others, by B. Malinowski in Great Britain, C. Lévi-Strauss in France, and T. Parsons in the USA). In 20th-century philosophy, the problem of the genesis of the forms of consciousness has become highly important. Freudianism advocates the derivation of the various forms of consciousness from primary archetypes; neo-Kantianism makes the principle of creative genesis the foundation of its epistemological theory; and in phenomenology there is a distinction between static and genetic phenomenology.
Modern science recognizes the necessity of uniting the structural and synchronic with the genetic and diachronic study of objects. The recognition of this necessity is expressed both in the critique of the purely evolutionary interpretation of genesis, where the laws of the functioning of the object under investigation have no part in the analysis, and in the attempt to modify the structural and functional approach in order to make possible the study of the genesis and development of structures.
As early as the 19th century Marxism proposed a synthesis of the structural and functional and the genetic study of objects. Moreover, Marxism emphasized the specific character of each of these approaches. K. Marx’ analysis of bourgeois economics includes both a study of the structure of a fully developed society based on trade and finance and a study of the processes of the genesis of capital and its various forms.
V. P. OGURTSOV