Epistemology

History of Epistemology

The philosophical area of epistemology dates back to antiquity. During the 5th century BCE, an ongoing debate between various schools existed regarding what counts as knowledge and how we come to know what we think we know. The Sophists questioned the possibility of reliable and objective knowledge. Plato rebutted the Sophists by proposing the existence of a world of unchanging abstract forms about which it is possible to have exact and certain knowledge through reasoning. Aristotle maintained that almost all knowledge is built from experience. If people think they have a proper knowledge of something, then they know the reason or cause of the thing. This requires understanding an object within a context of explanatory propositions. Pyrrho founded a school of skeptical philosophy in the period following Aristotelian philosophy. The Skeptics maintained that they were inquirers, refusing to acknowledge claims to knowledge unless a criterion of truth could be established. The rival philosophical schools, particularly the Stoics and Epicureans, tried to produce such a criterion—something in experience that had the mark of certain truth. During the Middle Ages, philosophers blended rational methods and faith into a unified system of beliefs, restoring confidence in reason and experience.

The shift to modern philosophy is often taken to be the publication of René Descartes's Meditations in 1641, since it posits a radical break with the Aristotelian scholastic tradition. During Descartes's time there was a renewed interest in skepticism. There are several varieties of skepticism, including views that there can be no knowledge of other persons or other minds, no knowledge of the past, no knowledge of contingent truths, and even the stance that nothing can be known. Descartes sought a sure foundation for knowledge by employing his method of doubt, a form of systematic skepticism, created to ascertain what could [Page 350]not be doubted. Descartes's systematic skepticism went further than any previous form of skepticism in that he was willing to apply the issue of doubt to himself (the existence of the self as a thinking thing). The culmination of modern philosophy is generally marked by the critical philosophy of Kant in the late 1700s. Kant's work arose out of an assessment of the shortcomings of both empiricism and rationalism; he synthesized the constructive insights of these philosophies. From the 17th to the late 19th centuries, the main argument in epistemology was whether knowledge was acquired through reasoning (a priori knowledge) or sense perception (a posteriori knowledge). Rationalists contended that all genuine knowledge of the real world is a priori knowledge. Empiricists argued that all such knowledge is a posteriori knowledge. Other philosophers sought to reconcile these positions, aiming to preserve important features of both rationalism and empiricism. Different epistemological directions were advanced during the 19th and 20th centuries, including additional inquiry into rationalist and empiricist lines of thought, as well as the emergence of continental and analytic philosophical traditions.

...