On confronting species-specific skepticism as we near the end of the twentieth century

James M. Edie

pp. 193-227

in: Robert Stufflebeam (ed), To work at the foundations, Berlin, Springer, 1997

Abstract

Ever since Socrates "called philosophy down from heaven to earth" to locate it in the cities and in the lives of individual human beings by exhorting them to turn within to their souls and to the concepts (logoi) that dwell therein, to turn to a knowledge of oneself first of all, to examine one's own inner life in its acts of knowing, believing, desiring, willing, evaluating, giving meaning and intelligibility to the chaos of earths, airs, fires, waters and bones, sinews, humors, and joints, which confront us in raw nature, Western philosophy has seen the necessary turn to the foundations of experience and of reality-as-experienced which has come to be called "foundationalism" in philosophy. In their many different ways all of the greatest philosophers of our tradition have been "foundationalists": Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel and Husserl, to mention only the "giants," who together and separately constitute the backbone of Western philosophy.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Plato

Augustinus Aurelius

Socrates