Ilina H. “Visual Thinking” in the Historical and Philosophical Retrospective

The thesis reveals the genesis of the formation of visual thinking in the history of philosophy. The relevance of the problem is caused by the development of the information world, where the scope of vision, or visual practices, is dominant. They are implemented primarily in the media space, which became the "index of mind" of modern reality. It is possible to understand modern society only on the condition of entering into the space of its media-visuality, in the context of the formation of "visual thinking" concept as well as related concepts of "visual knowledge", "visual culture", "visual experience", "visual intelligence", "visual perception", etc. These phenomena are becoming the object of cultural studies, psychology, social philosophy, and cognitive science. The analysis of the development of the history of philosophical thinking culture shows the inclusion of the phenomenon of visual in its logic. In the ancient Greek philosophy, the cognition was already understood as a kind of contemplation, and the disclosure of "being" was performed by means of sight. In the thesis, historical and philosophical reconstruction of the problem of "sight" is accomplished in two dimensions - lexicographic (analysis of basic concepts and categories of visual discourse) and doxographic (the search for visual ideas in the genesis of philosophical thought from antiquity to modern time).