Философия. Учебное пособие (практикум) на английском языке

Philosophy ●

Assistant provides material and technical support (posters, charts, etc.).

The results of the debate should be formed in students’ knowledge and skills, as well as the ability to defend their own point of view on the subject under consideration.

The seminar-debate is evaluated on a 10-point system. Individual components of the practical training are also evaluated on a 10-point system. The overall score for the workshop is displayed as a weighted average score. The structure of the scales is presented in the table, the weights are given depending on the characteristics of this type of work.

Test questions and tasks

1.What is consciousness? What is the opposite of ideological approaches to the problem of consciousness?

2.What is the difference between religious interpretation of consciousness and idealistic one?

3.How does metaphysical materialism understand the problem of consciousness?

4.What concept is broader – psyche or consciousness? What processes and phenomena are mental? Justify the answer.

5.Confirm or disprove the following statement: “Consciousness cannot include the wrong reflection, fiction conjecture, religious, mythological and other views”.

6.What is reflection? What types of reflections do you know?

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7.What is unconscious, what processes are unconscious? What kind of relation is between the unconscious and information?

8.What role does Z. Freud give to the unconscious in the theory of psychological protection?

9.Confirm or refute the position: “During sleep, the human consciousness is completely disconnected, and in this regard dreams do not lend themselves to any logical understanding”.

10.Why consciousness is in the nature of targeted development

really?

11.Explain features of influence of sociocultural factors on indi- vidual consciousness.

12.What is the role of consciousness in shaping its own “image of the world”?

13.What is the material nature of the language?

Literature

Basic: 1–2.

Additional: 1–4.

Internet-resources: 1–5.

Philosophy ●

7. The theory of Knowledge

The aim: to consider the basic gnoseological strategies in philosophy; to reveal the levels and forms of cognition; to analyze the concept of truth and determine its criteria; to reveal the specificity of scientific cognition.

The formed competences: ОК-1,ОК-5.

Knowledge and skills which the students acquire as a result of mastering of the theme, the formed competences or a part of it.

As a result of mastering the theme, students acquire:

•knowledge of the specifics of philosophical problems of cognition (gnoseology) and scientific cognition (epistemology);

•skills to analyze the problems of knowledge in their own professional activities;

•ability of the analysis of cognitive situations and problems.

The actuality of the theme is conditioned by the importance of studying the problems about the surrounding world, because such knowledge help a person to orient in the world and implement effective social practices.

Plan

1.The knowledge as Philosophical problem. The subject and object of cognition.

2.The structure of Knowledge. Sensual and rational knowledge

3.The problem of Truth in philosophy.

4.Practice as the Basis and Purpose of Cognition.

Theoretical part

As part of preparation for the first question it is important to give a philosophical analysis of knowledge as the most important form of human attitude to the world. Cognition is a spiritual activity aimed at reflectioninthesubjectiveformoftheworldofobjects,states,process- es, etc.; their systematization and storage. Theory of knowledge (epistemology) is a branch of philosophy that studies issues such as the nature of knowledge, its possibilities and boundaries, the relation of knowl- edge and reality, subject and object of knowledge, truth and error, the

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conditions of reliability of knowledge, forms and levels of knowledge, its socio-cultural factors.

The main problems of the theory of knowledge.

1)Understanding of the nature of cognition itself, revealing the foundations and conditions of cognitive process.

2)Determination of the final source of knowledge, characteristics of objects of knowledge.

3)The problem of the subject of cognition. What is the subject of cognition? What is the role of the subject in the process of interaction with the object?

4)Definition of content, forms of and patterns of knowledge?

5)Evaluation of the results of knowledge. What is truth? The correlation of truth and error? How is truth extracted and what are its criteria?

In philosophical discourse there are three principle positions on the potential of knowledge: optimism, skepticism, agnosticism.

The optimists (gnoseological optimism) assert that the world is in

principle knowable, the agnostrcs, on the contrary, reject this possibil- ity. As for sceptics, they do not reject outright the know ability of the world but question the validity of knowledge.

Intheprocessofcognition,anobjectisinevitablyrefractedthrough the prism of our sense organs and thought. We only have that infor- mation about the object which results from this refraction. We do not know,andneithercanweknow,whattheobjectsarelikeinreality.The world stretches before us without beginning or end, and we approach it with our formulas, schemata, models, concepts and categories endeavouring to catch its eternity and infinity in the net of our notions.

But the logic of agnosticism is refuted at every step by the development of science and knowledge in general. The agnosticism derives not only from epistemological and social causes but also to some extent from the tradition that goes back to the philosophy of Hume and Kant.

It is usually believed that the essence of Kant’s agnosticism is this: there is a fundamental difference between what a thing is for us (the phenomenon) and what it is in itself (the noumenon). Our knowledge will always differ from things as they are. It is this division of the world into phenomena accessible to knowledge and things unknowable in

Philosophy ●

themselves that precludes the possibility of their cognition. But Kant himself would have hardly regarded himself as an agnostic. He believed in infinite progress of knowledge. According to Kant, observation and analysis of phenomena go deep into the essence of nature, and we do not know just how far mankind will advance on this path.

First, Kant raised the question here of the basic limitations of human experience, and second, he recognized that reality goes beyond the limits of any knowledge: reality is more cunning than any theory, and it is much richer than any of them. Besides, he stated that the world is only cognized in the forms of its givenness to man. It was this last circumstance that permitted him to assert that a thing is cognized through phenomenon and not the way it exists in itself.

Agnosticism is an exaggerated form of scepticism. As we have said, scepticism recognizes the basic know ability of the world but doubts the reliabilityofknowledge.Asarule,scepticismflourishesatatime,oron the eve, of a breakdown of paradigms, replacement of one set of values by another, of one social system by another, when something previously believed to be true proves to be false and untenable in the light of new data of science and practice. The psychology of scepticism is such that it immediately begins to trample not only the things that have outlived their usefulness but also the newly born ones. Underlying this psychology is the habit of living in the lee of cozy principles taken on faith once and for all, and not the researcher’s thirst for innovation or faith in the power of human reason.

As a doctrine, scepticism undoubtedly does great harm, as it belittles man’s practical and cognitive potential. Doubt is a restless worm that eats away and destroys obsolete dogmas, it is a necessary element of developing science. There is no knowledge without a problem, and no problem without doubt. Doubt about generally accepted principles may be fruitful, leading to new views of the world.

Reasonable philosophical doubt, a healthy scepticism is not, in fact, an antithesis of the optimistic view of knowledge positing the basic knowability of the world. The foundation of the philosophy of optimism is the principle of the unity of the world and the entire experience of the history of scientific knowledge of socio-historical practice.

The concepts of subject and object in knowledge are correlative. The subjectisacomplexhierarchy,ofwhichthefoundationistheentire so-

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cial whole. In the final analysis, the highest producer of knowledge and wisdom is the entire mankind. Its development has produced smaller communities – the separate peoples. Each people, creating norms, ide- as and values recorded in its culture, also figures as a special subject of cognitive activity. Historically, society forms groups of individuals whose special purpose and occupation is production of knowledge of special vital value. Of this type in particular is scientific knowledge, of which the subject is the community of scientists. Separate individuals stand out in this community whose abilities, talent or genius produce particularly great intellectual achievements. History preserves the names of these people as outstanding landmarks in the evolution of scientific ideas.

So, the subject in the theory of cognition is a source of purposeful activity, the carrier of subject-practical activity, evaluation and cogni- tion.Thesubjectisaconsciousandknowledgeableperson.Infact,asa subjectofcognition,apersonactsasasocialbeing.Hebecomesasub- ject of cognition, only having mastered the language in society, having acquired previously acquired knowledge, being included in practical activities, having learned the means and methods of cognition that exist at the moment, and so on. We may say that the true subject of cognition in every era is humanity.

The true subject of cognition is never epistemological only: he is a living individual with his passions, interests, character traits, temperament, intellect or stupidity, talent or lack thereof, strong will or lack of any will. If the subject of cognition is a scientific community, it has specific features of its own: interpersonal relations, dependences, contradictions, and also common goals, unity of will and action. Most often, however,thesubjectofcognitionisinterpretedinthesenseofacertain impersonal logical concentrate of intellectual activity.

Fromthestandpointofcognitiveactivity,thesubjectdoesnotexist without an object,andtheobjectdoesnotexistwithouta subject. Thus genes existed in the structure of life at all times, but they were not ob- jectsofscientificthoughtinantiquityandeveninthetimesofLamarck or Darwin. For a long time scientists have been unable to identify this extremely elusive biological reality as an object of their thought. This was done only fairly recently, when essential changes took place in the overall scientific picture of the world.

Philosophy ●

In present-day epistemology, the distinction is made between the object and the subject matter of cognition. The object is seen as the real fragments of being that are subjected to study. The object is what confronts the subject, which are aimed at subject-practical, evaluative and cognitive activity of the subject. The subject matter of research are the concrete aspects at which the questing thought is targeted. For in- stance,manistheobjectofmanysciences:biology,medicine,psychol- ogy, sociology, philosophy, etc. Each of them sees man from an angle of its own; psychology studies man’s psyche and behaviour; medicine, his diseases and methods of curing them, and so on. The subject mat- ter thus includes, as it were, the researcher’s actual orientation: it is moulded in relation to the researcher’s task.

When answering the second question, it is necessary to proceed from the fact that a person has two basic cognitive abilities – feelings and mind, according to them, in the structure of cognition usually distinguish two levels: sensual and rational. Sensory cognition is carried out through the senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste). It is char- acterized by: spontaneity (direct reproduction of the object); visibility and specificity of the resulting images; reproduction of objects at the level of the phenomenon, i.e. their external sides and properties.

The main forms of sensual reflection are: sensations, perceptions, representations. The sensations reflect the individual properties and sides of the object (color, smell, etc.) and do not in themselves give a whole picture of the object of cognition. Perceptions is a synthesis of sen- sations that produces the complete image of the subject in the unity of its sides and properties. Finally, the visual representation of past perceptions through memory and imagination gives rise to such a form of cognition as representation. Compared to the perception it is a more generalized image of reality, is a stepping stone, allowing you to navi- gate to the rational reflection of reality. But it is not necessary to think that sensual cognition is a passive stage of information transfer from object to subject. Firstly, sensual reflection is active, secondly, it is so- cially conditioned (we are talking about human sensory reflection).

Rational cognition is more complex way of reflection of reality by means of thinking. Thinking of a person is not a purely natural prop- erty of a person, but a function of a social collective subject developed in the course of history.

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Forms of thinking are ways of reflection of reality by means of the interconnected abstractions among which the basic are: concepts, judgments and conclusions.

The concept is a form of thinking that reflects the general natural connections, essential aspects, signs of phenomena that are fixed in their definitions. The concepts are expressed in the language form as separate words (“atom”, “thing”, etc.) or in the form of phrases denoting classes of objects (“philosophical concepts”, “elementary particles”, etc.).

Judgment is a form of thinking that reflects things, phenomena, processes of reality, their properties, connections and relations. This mental reflection, usually expressed by narrative proposal, can be ei- ther true (“Moscow is the capital of Russia”), either false (“Paris is the capital of Russia”). In the form of judgments any of the properties and characteristics of the subject are reflected.

Conclusion is a form of thinking by means of which new knowl- edge (also usually in the form of judgment) is deduced from earlier established knowledge (usually from one or several judgments).

On the question of the role, place and relationship of the sensual and rational types of knowledge in the cognitive process in the history of philosophy there were two opposite points of view – sensualism and rationalism. Sensualists believe that the decisive role in the process of cognition belongs to the senses. Rationalists, relying primarily on the successes of mathematics, sought to prove that the universal and necessary truths are not derived directly from these sensual experience and its generalizations, but can be gleaned only from the thinking itself.

The development of philosophy, science and other forms of spiritual activity of people shows that in reality any knowledge is unity of two opposite parties – sensual and rational ones.

However, knowledge often goes beyond the created forms of thinking, cannot be explained with the help of concepts. It means that a moment of irrational takes place. Irrational is something which is beyond the mind, incommensurable with logical thinking. The followers of irrationalism in gnoseology oppose non-rational forms (faith, will, revelation, illumination) to discursive, conceptual, rational thinking and means of logic.

Answering on the third question it is important underline that the main problem in the theory of Knowledge is the problem of Truth.

Philosophy ●

Truth is usually understood as correspondence of knowledge to object.

Truth is adequate information about an object obtained through its sensuous or intellectual perception or report about it and characterized in terms of its reliability. Truth thus exists as a subjective or spiritual reality in its information and axiological aspects rather than as an ob- jectivereality.Thevalueofknowledgeisdeterminedbythemeasureof its truth. In other words, truth is a property of knowledge itself rather than the object of cognition.

That is why truth must be defined as an adequate reflection of an object by the knowing subject, which reproduces reality such as it is by itself, outside and independent of consciousness. It is the objective content of sensuous, empirical experience as well as of the concepts, judgements, theories, and finally of the entire integral picture of the world in the dynamics of its development. The fact that the truth is an adequate reflection of reality in the dynamics of its development lends it special value connected with the prognostic dimension.

True knowledge enables people to organize their practical activities in a rational manner in the present, and to foresee the future.

But mankind rarely grasps truths other than through extremes and errors. The progress of knowledge is not smooth. The history of science abounds in examples of errors being accepted as truths over hundreds of years. An error is an undesirable yet natural zigzag on the path towards truth.

Error is the content of consciousness that does not correspond to reality but is taken for the truth. The whole course of mankind’s cognitive activity shows that errors, too, reflect – albeit in one-sided form –ob- jective reality, they have a real source, an earthly basis. There are no, and neither can there be any, errors that reflect nothing whatever, not even in the most mediated and extremely distorted form. For example, are the images of fairy tales true? The answer is, yes, they are true, but only remotely – they are taken from life and transformed by the power of their creators’ imagination. There are strands of reality in any invention, forming quaint patterns woven by the power of the imagination. Taken as a whole, though, such images are not the truth.

Thus errors have their epistemological, psychological and social foundations. But they should be distinguished from lies as a moralpsychological phenomenon.

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Lies are a distortion of the actual state of affairs of which the goal is deceiving someone. A lie may be both an invention of something that did not exist or a deliberate concealment of something that did. Logi- cally incorrect thinking can also be a source of lies.

By its very essence, scientific cognition is impossible without con- flictbetweenvarious,sometimesopposingviews,justasitisimpossible without errors. In research, mistakes are often made in the course of observation, measurement, calculations, judgements, or evaluations.

As long as man is fighting his way forward, he errs. But gradually truth forces its way to the light.

Absolute and relative truth. Relative truth is limited true knowledge about something. Paradoxical though it may seem each step forward in science is a discovery of new secrets and of new horizons of ignorance. It is a process that reaches into infinity. Mankind has ever striven to come close to a knowledge of absolute truth, endeavouring to narrow down to a minimum the sphere of the relative in the content of scientific knowledge. But even a constant expansion, deepening and clarification of our knowledge cannot in principle overcome its probabilistic and relative character. One must not, however, veer to the other extreme and regard each scientific proposition as a mere hypothesis.

On the question of relativity of truth, let us stress that we refer to the sphere of scientific knowledge and not at all to absolutely authentic facts like the nonexistence of the king of France today. It is the availability of absolutely reliable and therefore absolutely true facts that is extremely important in people’s practical activity, especially in those areas that are connected with decisions affecting human fates. Absolute truths include ascertained facts, the dates of events, birth, death, etc.

Stated with complete clarity and authenticity, absolute truths do not encounter any further counter-arguments. In other words, abso- lute truth is identity of concept and object in thought –in the sense of complete coverage, of coincidence of essence and of all the forms of its manifestation. Of this nature are the propositions of science like, “The earth revolves round the sun”, and so on. Absolute truth is a piece of knowledge that is not refuted by the subsequent development of science but enriched and constantly reaffirmed by life.

Absolute truth in science is taken to mean exhaustive, extreme knowledge of an object, attainment, as it were, of the boundaries be-