epistemological turn
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English[edit]
Noun[edit]
epistemological turn (plural epistemological turns)
- (philosophy) In the history of Western philosophy, the shift in philosophical attention from the classical and medieval focus on themes of metaphysics to a primary focus on themes and issues relating to human knowledge, usually considered to have occurred during the period from Descartes (1596-1650) through Kant (1724-1804).
- 1967, Wilfrid Sellars, “Some Remarks on Kant's Theory of Experience”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume 64, number 20, page 634:
- The core of Kant's "epistemological turn" is the claim that the distinction between epistemic and ontological categories is an illusion.
- 1980, Robert Greene, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (review of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty), MLN, vol. 95, no. 5, p. 1387,
- He spends several of the book's eight chapters giving an account of "the epistemological turn" of modern philosophy, dealing primarily with the thought of Descartes, Locke, and Kant.
- 2004, Lex Newman, “Rocking the Foundations of Cartesian Knowledge”, in The Philosophical Review, volume 113, number 1, page 102:
- On standard accounts, Descartes's epistemological turn—a sea change in the history of philosophy—is marked by an inside-out approach to philosophical inquiry, an approach owed to the priority of thought.