Blackwell Reference Online

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In Latin reflectere and reflexio mean ‘to bend back’ and ‘bending back’. Animum reflectere , literally ‘to bend back the mind’, originally meant ‘to turn one's own or another's mind away, dissuade from (a course of action)’, but later came to mean ‘to turn one's thought to, reflect on, something’. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these gave rise to the German reflektieren (‘to reflect’) and Reflexion. These have three main senses, acquired by their Latin originals in medieval times: (1) To bend back or reflect, e.g. sound, heat, and especially light; hence to reflect or mirror an object by reflecting the light-waves from it. Reflexion is both the process of reflecting and its product, the reflected image. (2) To reflect on, consider a matter. Near-equivalents in this sense are nachdenken (‘to after-think, think over, reflect’) and überlegen, Überlegung (‘to consider’, ‘consideration’). (3) To turn back one's thoughts or attention from objects to oneself, to reflect upon oneself. In Locke and Leibniz, ‘reflection’ is perception of oneself or attention to what is ‘in us’. (Hegel often uses Reflexion and reflektieren in connection with relations : e.g. self- identity is ‘relation ( Beziehung ) to itself, not as immediate , but as reflected’ ( Enc. I §115). But he has no word for , and only a rudimentary concept of, a ‘reflexive’ ( reflexiv ) relation, ... log in or subscribe to read full text