Journal of Philosophical Investigations

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Benin, Nigeria

2 Lecturer at University of Benin, Nigeria (corresponding author)

Abstract

Over the centuries, beginning with the classic Greeks through the trends of the mid-20th century, philosophical enterprise has been intricately and seemingly irretrievably rooted in the theory of the given—an edification of philosophy as that giant mirror and standard for measuring what counts as knowledge; but is it thus synonymous with or reducible to epistemology? How or why? There are two answers to both of these questions. The attempt in this work is to delineate those separate concerns, their areas of convergence and disparity, but also indicated the genesis of edifying philosophy rooted in epistemology but which has been discredited in the works of some post-modernist reformers—Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, Quine, and Rorty. Against theirs, this piece shows that historically, philosophizing has had a methodology and some perceptual axioms; that it is not easy to abdicate it from this mode, no matter the will and zeal—for success is not a matter of will alone; that the post-modernists revolution is nothing new with its swollen nerves and arteries (as others before it, it soon wanes). It concludes that the urge for philosophic understanding shows no sign of abating and so the philosophical journey will probably go on and on, each stage building on and rewriting its past and ruminating specific but perennial problematic; that while some of the issues seemingly do appear resolved, others may have endured and eloped any final solution; and finally that the philosophical method and basic assumptions have seriously remained firmly even beyond post-modernist restructurers.

Keywords

  • Amundson, R. (1983). “The Epistemological Status of a Naturalized Epistemology”. In: Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 26, no. 3
  • Blackburn, Simon, (1996), Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bunnin, Nicholas, and Jiyuan Yu, (2004). The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
  • Dewey, J. (1929). The Quest for Certainty, New York: Capricorn Books.
  • Gadamer, Hans-Georg, (1975). Truth and Method, New York: Seabury Press, 1975. 2nd edn, New York: Crossroad, 1990.
  • Gadamer, (1976), Philosophical Hermeneutics, D. E. Linge, Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1976.
  • Owolabi, K. A. (ed.), (2000). Philosophy, Issues and Problems, Ibadan: Grovacs Network.
  • Papineau, D. “Is epistemology dead?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, vol. LXXXII, 1981/82, Aristotelian Society, Britain: 129-142.
  • Pollock, J. L. (1974). Knowledge and justification, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  • Popkin, R. H. (ed.), (1999). The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Quine, W. V. O. (1953). “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Also discussed in R. H. Popkin, cit.: 648-650.
  • Rorty, R. (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  • Rorty, (1982), Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Stumpf, S. E. (1975). History of Western Philosophy, New York: MacGraw-Hill Books.
  • Vico, Giambattista (1725). Scienza Nova. Discussed in Blackburn, S. Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford: OUP, 1996. See also Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, G. Tagliacozzo and D. Verene, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell. Also quoted in R. H. Popkin, cit.: 633.
CAPTCHA Image