The Microchronotope of Consciousness: The Analytics of the Spatiotemporal Structure of Thinking in the English Empiricism of the 17th Century and the Category of the Chronotope

Classical English empiricism of the 17th century is one of the most detailed and justified episte-mological theories in the European philosophic traditions. Such empiricists as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke proceeded from the priority of empirical cognition developed on the basis of inductive-analytical methodology. In contrast to them, French and German rationalists (Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) considered deductive and postulatory methods to be of primary importance. In the theory of empiricism, experience was divided into external (which involved the perception of the world around) and internal one consisting in consciousness reflection in the frames of which a cognoscitive subject appeals to the inner world of his intellect discovering and describing its content and structure. The key achievement of empirical epistemology was the detection of the a priori transcendental framework of the human cognitive ability in the process of its reflection (according to Immanuel Kant's famous term "physiology of the intellect"). This framework was formed by the spatiotemporal correlation the elements of which appeared both in the forms of perception making possible experience itself and, first of all, as the logical-schematic forms of thinking. The novelty and theoretical significance of this research consist in the fact that the structure of consciousness disclosed in the works of famous philosophers-empiricists is interpreted by the category of chronotope reflecting the spatiotemporal interrelations of Being. The foundation of this approach is the unity of the spatial and temporal dimensions of thinking demonstrated in classical empiricism and immanent for the mechanism of its synthesis. Moreover, dialectical interaction of consciousness with the phenomenal reality of the outside world proves to be the justification of this approach as well. In the final synthesis of epistemology statements and the chronotope theory, consciousness functions as an autonomous semantic spatiotemporal sphere in which acts of thinking and perception are considered to be the expression of its activity. The a priori chronotopological structure of intellect shown by the philosophy of empiricism demonstrates a strong correlation with the existential ontological basis of human being as far as the existence of thinking turns out to be connected with the existence of Being.

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