Foundations · I

A Short History of the Sources of Knowledge

From the world to the subject

Epistemology is the part of philosophy that asks how we know and where knowledge comes from. Iqbal’s title joins knowledge and experience, and that pairing has a history. Over two thousand years, the knowing subject moved from the background of philosophy to its center, and “experience” came to mean what consciousness lives through.

Plato and Aristotle 4th century BCE	Truth is out there, whether or not anyone knows it. This is realism. Plato asks the soul to turn toward the Forms, and Aristotle says the mind, in knowing, becomes one with its object. There is no inner screen between us and the world, and other minds are never in doubt.
Descartes Meditations, 1641	Begins from the one thing he cannot doubt: his own thinking. Everything we are directly aware of counts as thought, and the world is reached only through it. The subject becomes the starting point, and the split between subject and object begins.
Locke Essay, 1689	Keeps Descartes’s inner stage and his word “idea,” but denies that we are born with any ideas. Everything on the stage comes from experience, through sensation and through reflection on the mind’s own workings.
Kant Critique of Pure Reason, 1781	The mind shapes what it receives through its own forms, such as space, time and cause. We know things only as they appear, and knowledge stops at the limit of possible experience. Iqbal argues against this limit in the third paragraph.
Husserl 1900–1929	Studies experience exactly as it appears to consciousness. His key idea is that consciousness is always consciousness of something. He gave his Paris lectures on Descartes in 1929, around the same time as Iqbal’s lectures.

Truth held in common

For Plato and Aristotle, other minds were never a problem, and truth existed for all alike. Their way of doing philosophy shows it. Socrates questioned people in the marketplace, and the Academy and the Lyceum were places of shared argument. Dialogue only makes sense if two minds can reach the same truth. Heraclitus had said that “the logos is common, yet most people live as if they had a private understanding.” Aristotle tied this to politics: humans are political animals because they have logos, speech and reason, which lets them declare to one another what is just and unjust.

The city was also where shared truth was fought over. The Sophists taught persuasion for the assemblies, and Protagoras said that “man is the measure of all things.” Plato’s realism is partly an answer to them. After Descartes the starting point changed: each mind begins inside its own experience, other minds become a problem, and political philosophy begins from separate individuals who must agree to form a society, as in the social contract of Hobbes and Locke.