The Rise, Fall and Rise of Epistemology

Extract

I began the study of philosophy in an organized fashion after I was demobilised in 1946. My first steps were firmly Lockean. Innate idea, substance, primary and secondary qualities and personal identity were the topics of the first term's essays, along with smaller infusions of Descartes, Berkeley and Hume. The fundamental examination paper in those days in Oxford was General Philosophy and that meant the problems in the theory of knowledge that had exercised the great philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, beyond them, Russell, Moore, Price and Ayer. The syllabus was very clearly set out by the chapter headings of Russell's Problems of Philosophy.