Epistemological foundations of the development of personal thinking: from bodily and social awareness to moral issues

The humanistic educational paradigm assumes an emphasis on the development of personality and sociality, in connection with which practices and methods of thinking development are actively introduced into education, those being aimed, inter alia, at the formation of personal and social awareness, responsibility, and participation. The paper presents a study of the epistemological foundations of pedagogical practices aimed at the development of personal thinking as a purposeful exploration of one’s own physicality, cognitive abilities, attitudes, and values in the context of moral issues, the tasks of developing self-regulation and self-actualization of personality in modern education. A fundamental theoretical basis of the research includes classical philosophical sources (Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel) as well as modern works in the field of psychology, social and cognitive sciences, epistemology. Using Hegel’s approach to the analysis of the necessary stages of the formation (Bildung) of self-consciousness in the «science of consciousness experience», it is proposed to match the stages of the formation of self-consciousness in the history of world culture with the stages of the development of reflection of consciousness in individual experience, including relying on the differentiation-integration theory of development (N.I. Chuprikova, Yu.I. Alexandrov, et al.) Basing on the material of history of philosophy and looking at it through the prism of developmental psychology, the study considers the epistemological foundations of self-regulation development practices. Through the analysis of the problems of ethic self-consciousness (allgemein Selbstbewusstsein) from the standpoint of classical philosophy, a conclusion is made about the need for further theoretical and methodological study of the philosophical and psychological-pedagogical practices of self-cognition and self-consciousness used in education taking into account the relevant data of modern science and epistemology. The paper substantiates the conclusion about the productivity and expediency of further philosophical conceptualization of the methodology and theoretical foundations of pedagogical practices used in the modern educational process to teach students how to reflect on their bodily and mental experience in the context of growing interest in the development of personal, bodily, and social awareness in education.