Background: Tsiolkovsky’s philosophical views are considered evidently in the context of the tradition of Russian cosmism. This methodological attitude leads to a simplification and, in some cases, falsification of both the position of Tsiolkovsky and the views of other thinkers, who in the historical and philosophical literature are usually referred to as “Russian cosmists”. Results: The use of the term “Russian cosmism” to denote a special tradition in the development of Russian philosophy seems inconsistent from the scientific point of view. The term “Russian cosmism” was put into circulation as a heuristic product of historical and philosophical interpretation in the 1970s. Since the end of the twentieth century, it has been used mainly as an ideologeme to prove the superiority of Russian religious and philosophical thought, focused on the superrational comprehension of the whole as a subject of radical futurology, over rationalistic European philosophy, which is claimed to have caused the stagnation and degradation of Western civilization. Conclusion: To study Tsiolkovsky’s philosophical ideas adequately, it is necessary to refuse to attribute them to the tradition of “Russian cosmism”. The consideration of Tsiolkovsky’s philosophical works seems more convincing in the context of scientism, which determined the problems of philosophical study in Russia at the end of the 19th - first three decades of the 20th centuries, or more precisely, in the context of Russian empirio-criticism. The second positivism had a noticeable influence on Tsiolkovsky’s views. The philosophical ideas of the Russian thinker, the theory of universal atomocracy in particular, are the result of the creative adoption and development of the main concepts of positive philosophy.