The Idea of a Transcendent God and the Emergence of a Cognitive Level D in the Four-level Theory of Cognitive Development

Abstract

The proposed study addresses the analysis of sociocultural factors that influenced the emergence of the cognitive level D in the Four-Level Theory of Cognitive De­velopment, in other words, the emergence, primarily in mathematics and theoret­ical physics, of cognitive models of a higher level of abstraction than the models developed in early theoretical cultures, such as that of Ancient Greece. The article shows that one of the key factors of this type may be the idea of a transcendent en­tity, the emergence of which required the development of special approaches to its description that were absent before. Created in the Middle Ages within the frame­work of theology, these approaches were later transferred to other areas, which in­fluenced the development of science in the Modern era. As reference points illus­trating the above process, the author chooses Plotinus’ construal of the One, Augustine’s approach to the problem of describing the essence of God by rational categories and his view of numbers, and Thomas Aquinas’ interpretation of the problem of the coherence between the language describing God and the one de­scribing his creations (equivocality, univocality, analogy). Of a special interest is, in the article, Plotinus’ metaphor of the center of a circle and a number of concent­ric circles with this center.