How Philosophy Becomes Possible: V. When Knowledge Must Begin Again

Once inherited authority can be questioned, philosophy faces a new problem.

If Aristotle cannot simply be accepted because he is Aristotle, and if tradition cannot by itself settle a disagreement, then what can?

The question is more radical than it first appears.

To ask how knowledge can be justified is to ask whether inquiry has a starting point that does not depend entirely on what has already been inherited.

Medieval philosophy had already developed elaborate accounts of knowledge. But the growing distinction between authority and justification created pressure for something new: a more explicit examination of the conditions under which human beings can know.

This pressure did not immediately produce modern rationalism or empiricism. There was no sudden discovery that knowledge must begin either with reason or with experience.

Instead, the problem of knowledge itself became increasingly difficult to ignore.

What does the mind actually know?

How does it acquire knowledge?

Can the senses be trusted?

What is the relation between a thing and our conception of it?

What distinguishes genuine knowledge from opinion?

These questions had ancient precedents. What changed was their place within the philosophical possibility-space.

They could now become central problems rather than questions largely embedded within an established account of reality.

This shift was encouraged by developments outside philosophy as well. Increasing attention to observation, mathematical reasoning, linguistic analysis and the interpretation of texts created different ways of asking what warranted a claim.

Knowledge could increasingly be treated as something whose conditions had to be investigated.

That is an important change.

Previously, philosophy could often begin with an already structured world and ask how its different features were related. Now philosophy could begin by asking how the knower gains access to that world at all.

The direction of inquiry begins to turn.

Instead of:

What is the world, and how is it ordered?

we increasingly encounter:

How can we know what the world is?

The two questions are not opposites. But the second places the activity of knowing under philosophical scrutiny.

And once knowing itself becomes problematic, the individual knower acquires a new philosophical significance.

The question is no longer simply whether the world has an intelligible structure.

It is whether we have any secure way of reaching that structure.

This is still far from Descartes.

But the possibility of Descartes is beginning to emerge.

For if knowledge requires justification, and inherited authority cannot provide that justification by itself, philosophy may eventually seek something that cannot be borrowed from tradition at all.

It may seek a starting point from which knowledge can begin again.