Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2018 number 2

Introduction. This article is devoted to the problems of visualization of philosophical knowledge on the example of infographics of thought philosophical experiments. It is no secret that even at the time of its appearance, philosophy as the pinnacle of the abstract way of understanding the world had several advantages over the objective knowledge of the world. The intelligible speculative character of philosophical knowledge, which grew up within the framework of classical metaphysics, adapted its categorical apparatus to the knowledge that in principle is impossible not only to see, but even to know to the end. Since the time of Plato and his famous «Allegory of the Cave», philosophers have been unanimous in that only the construction of speculative theories can fully explain all the problems of philosophical knowledge. At the same time, the visual, despite anti-visual rhetoric, was constantly present in the philosophical discourse in the form of a visual metaphor, even though, according to classical Platonic idealism, the visible and the intelligible tend to some extent to incompatible goals, because the first is guided by the world of illusions, shadows and errors, the second, to the true light of truth, proceeding from the «sun-like» good, accessible for contemplation only to the inner mental vision, which is specially prepared with the help of philosophical exercises. However, during the course of intellectual evolution, i.e. the evolution of philosophy and science, the tactics of visual cognition developed in the world of cognition, creating a whole layer of visual metaphors that turned out to be not only visual, but also a material for thought philosophical experiments and thought experiments in the field of science. There appeared the possibility of constructing full-fledged homomorphic models, some of which were not only described visually-metaphorically, but had their own quite graphic analogs. Methodology of methods of research is built on the basis of the approaches that arose in the framework of the so-called «visual turn» in philosophy. The tabular method and circular diagrams with internal connections are used as a technique for visual analysis and presentation of philosophical thought experiments. The main method of analysis is the decomposition of thought philosophical experiments into composite elements and their subsequent combination. As a result of the research, an author's method for decomposing thought experiments on the basis of logical-structural, reflexive and information criteria is proposed, which makes it possible to find the key reflexive-structural mechanism that determines the essence and distinctive features of thought experiment. A table of probable combinations of 26 known thought experiments is also offered, which shows the final range of superposition and connection of selected thought experiments with each other. Within the framework of the revealed combinations, the author identifies the most well-known connections of thought experiments, acting in relation to each other as a complement or even an analogue. In conclusion, the role of the infographics of thought experiments in the development of visual thinking is described, without which the modern education system is inconceivable. The formation of «visual literacy» of students is able to provide future specialists with ways of extracting new knowledge and their translation in the visual world of the Internet.