The status of philosophy as an independent intellectual pursuit is a relatively recent development.
Present-day philosophers usually envision their discipline as an endeavor that has been, since
antiquity, distinct from and superior to any particular intellectual discipline, such as theology and
science. Such philosophical concerns as the mind-body problem or, more generally, the nature
of human knowledge, they believe, are basic human questions whose tentative philosophical solutions have served as the necessary foundations on which all other intellectual speculation
has rested.
The basic for this view, however, lies in a serious misinterpretation of the past, a projection of
modern concerns onto the past events. The idea of an autonomous discipline called
" philosophy, " distinct from and sitting in judgment on such pursuits as theology and science
turns outs, on close examination, to be of quite recent origin. When, in the seventeenth century,
Descartes and Hobbes rejected medieval philosophy, they did not think of themselves, as
modern philosophers do, as proposing a new and better philosophy, nut rather as furthering
" the warfare between science and theology ", They were fighting, albeit discreetly, to open the
intellectual life from ecclesiastical philosophy, and envisioned their work as contribution to the
growth, not of philosophy, but of research in mathematics and physics. The links between
philosophical interests and scientific practice persisted until the nineteenth century, when
decline in ecclesiastical power over scholarship and changes in the nature of science
provokes the final separation of philosophy from both.
The demarcation of philosophy from science was facilitated by the development in the early
nineteenth century of a new notion, that philosophy's core interest should be epistemology, the
general explanation of what is means to know something. Modern philosophers now trace that
notion back at less to Descartes and Spinoza, but it was not explicitly articulated until the late
nineteenth century. Without the idea of epistemology, the survival of philosophy in an age of
modern science is hard to imagine. Metaphysics philosophy's traditional core-considered as
the most general description of how the heavens and the earth are put together - had been
rendered almost completely meaningless by the spectacular progress of physics. Kant,
however, by focusing philosophy on the problem of knowledge, managed to replace
metaphysics with epistemology, and thus to transform the notion of philosophy as
" queen of science " into the new notion of philosophy as a separate, fundamental discipline.
Philosophy became " primary " no longer in the sense of " highest " but in the sense of
" underlying ". After Kant, philosophers were able to reinterpret seventeenth-and-eighteenth
century thinkers as attempting discover " How is our knowledge possible ?" and to project this
question back even on the ancients.
