The purpose of the article is to analyze the development of basic intellectual paradigms of museological knowledge in the context of culture of a particular period and to establish the degree of their correlation. The “archaeological” project of humanism contributed to the formation of its foundations. Its characteristic feature was aspiration for materializing knowledge, and, therefore, attention to the practices of organizing its bearers. The dissemination of Cartesianism was the decisive factor, as it stated the rigid dualism of subject-object relations as the basis of world perception. Revolutionary changes at the turn of 18th - 19th centuries contributed to the manifestation of philosophical aspects of museological knowledge, which were reflected in the field of aesthetics. The transition to the next stage was connected with the spread of evolutionary ideas. They determined the interest to the historical aspect of the formation of the museum institute (“the origin of the species”), and also to improvement of the technique of its work (“struggle for existence”). In the second half of the twentieth century the development of museology was more explicitly, than it had been before, associated with the socio-political context. It led to a dichotomy in its development in the bipolar world. On the one hand, a special understanding of the relationships between theory and practice, characteristic for Marxism, contributed to the development in the Warsaw bloc museology as an independent academic discipline. On the other hand, the practice-oriented approach connected with the philosophy of pragmatism and the influence of structuralism ideas contributed not only to the formation of a more situational understanding of museology in the West, but also to the expansion of the object of its attention towards to a more holistic concept of “heritage”. Contacts between representatives of these two directions, that began in the late 1970s - 1980s, and the “cultural turn” in social sciences have led to conceptual heterogeneity, characteristic for the modern museology.