Philosophical prerequisites for researching the personal and developmental potential of knowledge of the prospective engineer

Changes taking place in the dynamically developing industrial production and society determine the key resource and wealth of the information society – knowledge, meanings, ideas, educational design and creativity of the subject of engineering activity. The problem of the personal development potential of knowledge as the most important attribution that becomes in the space of professional self-development of the prospective engineer is relevant for modern society. Today, the need for innovative transformations in the training of engineers of a new formation with the appropriate amount of knowledge for the successful solution of scientific, technical and production-organizational problems is obvious. The idea of coevolution of natural and social epistemically manifests itself in modern bionic engineering projects, awakening professional education to investigate the phenomenon of interpenetration of knowledge and mechanisms of cognition. The paper attempted to assess the existing aspects of the problem under consideration, to justify the relevance of the appeal to philosophical and scientific knowledge, the teaching of knowledge, the fundamental provisions of which will provide the required result, both for professional and personal development of prospective engineers. To determine the philosophical prerequisites for the personal-developing potential of knowledge, we turned to epistemology, a science that is more occupied with the value-meaning question: «What is knowledge for a person? What matters more in the development of personality as a subject of cognition?» The study has found that in the changed conditions of modern information and communicative civilization, epistemology puts forward the requirement to rethink traditional ideas about knowledge, how to obtain it and justify it. Its task-target functionality includes understanding the categorical essence of knowledge, identifying the grounds for its reliability, considering the mechanisms and models of cognitive processes; search for prerequisites for the developing potential of knowledge; awareness of the world around us, and the opportunities to live and act in it.