Philosophical Reflection: Its Essence, Forms, and Types

This article addresses the issue of philosophical reflection, its essence, forms, and types. This may be considered as one of the major issues in the history of philosophy, when it comes to discussing the nature of philosophical cognition and its outcomes, being the subject of profound metaphilosophical analysis in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Kant, Husserl, Russell, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Derrida, etc. In modern philosophy, the term ―philosophical reflection‖ is normally used to denote the criticism and clarification of the ultimate grounds, constitutive preconditions of human thinking, communicative practices and practical activity. Here quite a broad problem field for analysis opens up for theoretical philosophy. There are the following forms of reflection as a special cognitive procedure: doubt, irony, criticism, paradox, and questioning. All these forms are of a universal epistemological nature and are applied in all types of human cognition: everyday cognition, arts, science, and philosophy. Applied to philosophical cognition, they gave birth to five major types of philosophical reflection: transdoxical, paradoxical, fundamental, constitutive, and cognitive. The article analyzes the content and characteristics of each of the types of philosophical reflection and discusses the domain and boundaries of their applicability. The authors propose introducing a new, more universal, type of philosophical reflection, which they term ―interval reflection‖.