The philosophers of ancient Greece did not know the word “consciousness”. However, they talked a lot about man and knowledge. Moreover, the process of cognition was directly associated with the ability to contemplate the order of things, giving this ability a special meaning, commensurate with the intellectual virtue and wisdom of the philosopher. Aristotle encourages the study of philosophy, invites contemplation, and proclaims thought to be the highest good. Afterwards thinking began to mean worldly wisdom, while preserving the meaning of ideas. The very concept of “idea” becomes an expression of a spiritual image, which can be embraced by thought, “grasped” in understanding, i. e. realized. The emergence of the philosophy of mind is associated with the fundamental nature of the problems themselves, the interdisciplinary orientation of research, which generates a variety of approaches to consciousness and the formulation of well-grounded concepts of consciousness. As an object of scientific theory, consciousness is considered exclusively as an object consistent with a variety of facts of an empirical nature. Specific disciplines that study various cognitive manifestations of human consciousness put forward their own, often purely disciplinary approaches, which, nevertheless, need adequate philosophical interpretation. Modern researchers take into account the fact of the dependence between a specific state of consciousness and the entire cognitive system of a person. Hence, in relation to consciousness, we can have at least two approaches: concrete-scientific, which requires familiarization with the variety of empirical data of mental processes, and philosophical. Apparently, it is the combination of these two approaches in understanding the essence of consciousness — both as a phenomenon and as a special concept in interdisciplinary research — that seems appropriate and effective.
For citation: Shulga E.N. Consciousness in historical-philosophical and cognitive discourse, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 3, pp. 152—161.