Stages of formation of ideas about cognition (from the Ancient world to the New Time)

The article presents the author's reconstruction of the main stages of the origin of ideas about cognition. The picture of the reality of cognition accepted in modern science is presented, in which the yet unknown world is contrasted as a source of latent knowledge and patterns and a person as a cognizer striving to discover this knowledge. It is argued that in the Ancient World, such a familiar picture for a modern person did not take place. An analysis of the way of mastering the world related to this period shows that it represented the resolution of problematic situations through the invention of knowledge and schemes (local and fundamental), opening the way to understanding and new behavior. Together, local and fundamental schemes set the Ancient world, understandable and epistemologically transparent, requiring no knowledge. Man lived in a world of souls, spirits and gods. Although he created this world himself, solving problematic situations, he perceived it as having always existed. Cognition begins to take shape, starting with ancient culture; its prerequisites are the formation of an ancient personality and the invention of a new way of obtaining knowledge, not on diagrams, but in reasoning. The contribution of Plato and Aristotle to this revolutionary epistemic process is considered. The first introduces cognition as a dialectical and partly sacred way of understanding a new way of obtaining consistent knowledge. Stagirite transfers knowledge from heaven to earth, and places the source of new knowledge in things. Aristotle interprets this source as a hidden natural movement, calling it nature. The author reconstructs two more stages of the formation of knowledge related to the Middle Ages and modern times. It turned out that nature is not only movements hidden from human eyes, but those that are "written in the language of mathematics" and "constrained," as Francis Bacon wrote, by human art. The article ends with an indication of the next stage in the evolution of cognition, characteristic of the study of humanitarian and social phenomena.

cognition, the picture of the world, reconstruction, explanation, comprehension, schemes, knowledge, movement, reality, nature