The topic of “cognition and translation” accompanied the author all his life: from a university coursework on translations of Shakespeare, through Foucault’s “Words and Things,” published during the “stagnation” period, to recent translations of works from the field of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Therefore, “cognition and translation” is an area of personal experience in which there is a lot of things - practice, reflection along the way, and comparison of approaches to translation in different periods and in different countries. Translation is an anthropological constant of human existence and a condition for the possibility of knowledge in the humanities; at the same time, this is not a purely academic matter, but a sphere of passions and clashes. Why has translation become a philosophical problem these days? All this will be discussed in the book. It has two sections: the first – about cognition and language, the second – about translation as a reflexive resource of understanding. The book is intended for a wide range of readers interested in the history of cognition, problems of philosophy, language, culture. The design uses a fragment of the “Tower of Babel” mosaic from the Cathedral San Marco in Venice.