Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to Kultur? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing! It is a whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a whole ethic above all, a whole religion that is to say, a whole economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is rationally absurd. For what did Don Quixote fight?
It is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical epistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific or theological theory, should innocently suppose that it was analysing truth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its view of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system which those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to divine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.
Metaphysics is taken to mean, not an analysis of experience, but a groping behind the veil of phenomena for some reality not given in experience. In other words, what Professor Cornelius condemns is what many of the rest of us also condemn under another name. What he calls metaphysics, we call bad metaphysics; and what he calls epistemology, we call metaphysics.
Wilson, a man from whom we both differ in politics, in theology, in ethics and in epistemology, but one whose great gifts, particularly for moral endeavour in the grand manner, excite our sincere admiration. Both his foes and his friends, it seems to us, do him a good deal of injustice.
This saying of the imperial Stoic suggests another characteristic of the thought of the age its ethical cast. From the time of Aristotle men had been content to have, to a large extent, the abstract problems of Ontology, Epistemology, and the others, and to lay emphasis on questions of life and manners.
The pragmatizing epistemologist posits there a reality and a mind with ideas. What, now, he asks, can make those ideas true of that reality? Ordinary epistemology contents itself with the vague statement that the ideas must 'correspond' or 'agree'; the pragmatist insists on being more concrete, and asks what such 'agreement' may mean in detail.
Bit the 'gulf' here is that which the pragmatist epistemology itself fixes in the very first words it uses, by saying there must be an object and an idea. The idea however doesn't immediately leap the gulf, it only works from next to next so as to bridge it, fully or approximately. If it bridges it, in the pragmatist's vision of his hypothetical universe, it can be called a 'true' idea.
Concerning sense-data, we know that they are there while they are data, and this is the epistemological basis of all our knowledge of external particulars. Sense-data at the times when they are data are all that we directly and primitively know of the external world; hence in epistemology the fact that they are data is all-important.
We may, for convenience, group together these deeper questions regarding the nature of knowledge and its scope, and call the subject of our study "Epistemology." But it should be remarked, in the first place, that, when we work in this field, we are exercising a reflective analysis of precisely the type employed in making the metaphysical analyses contained in the earlier chapters of this book.
It seems evident that the subject is a hard one to understand, under its apparent simplicity; and evident also, I think, that the definitive settlement of it will mark a turning-point in the history of epistemology, and consequently in that of general philosophy.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking