The Historicity of Knowledge by Babu Thaliath

Lecture given at Doon University in Dehradun on 16th May 2017

Abstract:

Can knowledge have a history? Plato's emphatic differentiation between episteme (ἐπιστήμη) and doxa (δόξα) clearly points to an ahistoricity of episteme, which, unlike doxa (an opinion or a belief) refers to eternal ideas or to pure being which is not subjected to temporal or historical transformations. In my lecture, I try to show how the original ahistoricity of episteme, on which the philosophical and scientific epistemologies are based, was always presupposed by a secure epistemological referentiality – i.e. by a secure or safe epistemological access to pure ideas. Already in antiquity we can recognize many strategic preferences in terms of subject's epistemological reference to the object of knowledge. In comparison with Plato, Aristotle attempted to reverse the epistemological referentiality, so that scientific knowledge refers to natural phenomena, i.e. to sensible objects. With such an epistemological referentiality of knowledge, one clearly faces the inconsistencies of being that are inherent in natural phenomena (and which Plato strategically avoided through exclusive epistemological references to eternal ideas). The inconsistencies of objective being led to phenomenal aporias that characterized many of the Aristotelian discourses within the framework of his Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy. The medieval scholasticism inherited the ancient aporias that found various expressions in the aporetic discourses of the medieval natural philosophy (philosophia naturalis). The early modern age of Descartes and Newton tried to terminate the aporetics, which were characteristically represented in the medieval discourses on mechanical phenomena such as impetus, gravity, space, time, infinitesimal etc., the major tool for this termination being the strategic axiomatization of philosophical and scientific knowledge. Consequently, the axioms should establish themselves as stable and final cognitions and thus prove to be ahistorical. However, the Cartesian-epistemological turn had led to further problems of epistemological referentiality. The epistemological-referential access to objects seemed once again to be hampered by many new obstacles, as represented by mathematical formalism, pictorial representations of natural phenomena, and by historical contexts and paradigms of science. The problems of epistemological referentiality, which had emerged at the dawn of early modern age in mathematical and mechanical axiomatization of natural-philosophical knowledge, seemed to re-establish the historicity of scientific knowledge. In my lecture I try to explain – by means of a few examples from mechanics and optics – the emergence of the historicity of scientific knowledge in modern age.