Preface

Summary

There's a story making the rounds today about the beginnings of modern philosophy in which John Locke is either villain or tragic hero – take your pick. According to this story, the core of modern philosophy was epistemology, “theory of knowledge”; and epistemology was the project of discovering the nature, foundations, and scope of knowledge.

Philosophy as a discipline thus [saw] itself as the attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art, or religion. It [purported] to do this on the basis of its special understanding of the nature of knowledge and of mind. Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is the assemblage of claims to knowledge, and philosophy adjudicates such claims. It can do so because it understands the foundations of knowledge, and it finds these foundations in a study of man-as-knower, of the “mental processes” or the “activity of representation” which make knowledge possible … Philosophy's central concern [was] to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so).

It is to the seventeenth century in general, but “especially to Locke” that “we owe the notion of [philosophy as] a “theory of knowledge” based on an understanding of “mental processes.”