Epistemology
EPISTEMOLOGY. This branch of philosophy studies the nature, origin, and validity of knowledge; it is sometimes called "theory of knowledge." Epistemology has been central to modern philosophy since the sixteenth century, although it originally developed in Greek philosophy in close relation to ontology (theory of being) and metaphysics. (It is an open question whether epistemology can be completely disentangled from metaphysics.)
In Greek philosophy, and especially in Plato and Aristotle, the two words used to mean "knowledge" are epistēmē and gnōsis, the former having the narrower, more scientific connotation in opposition to doxa ("belief"), the latter the wider one, covering also perception, memory, and experience. Plato and Aristotle relate these two conceptions to the terms noēsis ("thinking, intuition") and sophia ("wisdom"). The Western Christian tradition, however, has paid more attention to epistemology than to gnoseology; the latter plays a greater role in Eastern Christian philosophy and theology, and, it goes without saying, among the gnostics.
Among the various epistemological positions (that is, theories of knowledge in the narrower sense), realism, which is the claim—deriving from Plato and Aristotle—that forms and universals are objectively real (whether ante rem, "before things," as in Plato or in re, "in things," as in Aristotle) has had by far the longest tenure. In modern times, at least since William of Ockham in the fourteenth century, nominalism, or the view that forms and universals are only in language and in the mind, has held the field. The issue, however, is by no means dead and, oddly enough, returns in connection with modern philosophies of mathematics and even in the understanding of information theory.
A second, equally important epistemological question has been whether universal ideas are innate or only obtained through the senses. The two positions on this question were staked out by Plato and Aristotle respectively, the controversy continuing through the Middle Ages, with Augustine on the Platonic side and Thomas Aquinas on the Aristotelian. Modern philosophy begins with Descartes's emphatic support for the Platonic-Augustinian position. His contention that clear and distinct ideas are innate (a view often called epistemological idealism, to distinguish it from Plato's joint ontological and epistemological idealism) was challenged in turn by the British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), who sought to show that all ideas derive from the senses. Kant defined a new position by arguing the so-called presuppositional character of the "forms of perception" and "categories of understanding."
These epistemological controversies (which find remarkable—although still insufficiently studied—parallels in the histories of both Hindu and Buddhist philosophies) have had a close relation to religious practices and doctrines, not only among Christians, but also among Jews and Muslims. Thus, for example, realism appears to support the theological doctrine concerning the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Mass, while nominalism is more congruent with the Protestant idea of the last supper, or "meal of remembrance." Similarly, realism is helpful in harmonizing revealed and natural theology, while voluntarism and fideism are more naturally related to nominalism.
Christianity, like the other monotheistic religions, cannot submit knowledge about God to ordinary epistemic criteria. Nor can it, without abjuring the biblical conception of faith, accept the pretensions of unrestrained gnosis or esoteric accretions. The resultant difficulties have given rise to such theological maneuvers as the Averroistic "double truth" (one for the natural, the other for the revealed) and the Thomistic "analogy of being" (in which the possibility of a single univocal meaning for the word being is renounced). In attempting to escape the Scylla of fideism, in which knowledge ultimately has no place at all in religion, Western religions have always been in danger of running afoul of the Charybdis of gnosticism, in which there is no need or room for faith. And behind these doctrines lurk the still greater dangers of atheism and pantheism, as well as gnostic dualism.
Epistemological issues in modern times have tended to revolve around the question of the existence of God and whether it is possible to know this or to establish it by some kind of "proof." Thus Anselm's purely a priori "ontological proof" vies with Thomas Aquinas's "five ways," which allegedly derive from empirical experience. All such "proofs" were rejected by Kant in favor of a moral argument that finds God a necessary presupposition of the moral, or practical reason. Here epistemology once again is closely related to ethics, as it had been in a different way in Greek and medieval philosophy. If the medieval world culminated in Dante's visionary belief that knowledge is love, the modern world has been working out the quite different formula of Francis Bacon that knowledge is power. The limits of this power, now coming into view, suggest the limits of the conception of knowledge and perhaps the limits of the epistemological enterprise as a whole.
A word must be said also about mysticism as a way of knowing in religion, apart from both reason and ordinary experience. When, for example, the poet Henry Vaughan says, "I saw eternity the other night," or an otherwise normal and ordinary person reports, "In one moment I was liberated and knew the purpose of life," we do not have criteria for judging the validity of the "knowledge" involved. Epistemology tends to look at such matters in terms of psychology and ethics, rather than ontology and metaphysics.
Since the twentieth century there have been signs that the three-hundred-year-old predominance of epistemology in philosophy is giving way to a concern with semantics, semiology, and meaning. If epistemology cannot find its way out of either subjectivism (Cartesianism, psychologism, psychoanalysis) or objectivism (materialism, positivism, Marxism), it is perhaps because these are simply two faces of the epistemological attitude itself, which, because it begins with the separation of knower and known (and, as it were, makes this central), cannot get them back together except in these unsatisfactory ways. Seen in this light, epistemology may lose its central role in philosophy. Other ways of conceiving human involvement in the world may turn out to be more sensible and useful.
If religion has been on the defensive against science in the modern era, the difficulty may turn out to lie not so much in the differences between religious and scientific ways of knowing as in the epistemological stance itself. Important modern philosophers, particularly Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, abandoned the epistemological or "representational" point of view itself in their later philosophies. And this is very likely to be the direction to which philosophy itself will go in the future.
Metaphysics.
Bibliography
No outstanding survey history of epistemology exists. The most important works on the subject are the classic sources themselves.
Aristotle. Posterior Analytics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon. New York, 1941.
Augustine. Concerning the Teacher. Translated by G. C. Leckie. In Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, edited by Whitney J. Oates, vol. 1, pp. 361–389. New York, 1948.
Berkeley, George. A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Edited by A. C. Frazer. London, 1901.
Descartes, René. Meditations. In Philosophical Works of Descartes, edited by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Cambridge, U.K., 1911.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. New York, 1910.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Human Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London, 1950.
Leibniz, G. W. New Essays on Human Understanding. Edited by A. G. Langley. La Salle, Ill., 1949.
Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. 2 vols. Edited by A. C. Frazer. Oxford, 1894.
Plato. Theaetetus. In Plato's Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato, edited by Francis M. Cornford. London, 1935.
Russell, Bertrand. Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits. New York, 1948.
Thomas Aquinas. Truth. 3 vols. Translated by R. W. Mulligan, J. V. McGlynn, and R. W. Schmidt. Chicago, 1952–1954.
New Sources
Alcoff, Linda, ed. Epistemology: The Big Question. Oxford, U.K., 1998.
Anderson, Pamela Sue. A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief. London, 1997.
Bonjour, Laurence. Epistemology: Classical Problems and Contemporary Responses. Lanham, Md., 2002.
Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant and Proper Function. New York, 1993.
Sosa, Ernest. Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology. 1991; reprint Cambridge, U.K., 2003.
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