His contributions range from a comprehensive account of order in all its various meanings (natural, human, and divine) to epistemological and methodological directions concerning the progress of knowledge, from an elaborate theory of the immortality of the soul to a sophisticated analysis of the role of practical wisdom (prudentia) in such diverse human activities as medicine and political action.
These have often been motivated more by considerations in the philosophy of mind than by epistemology, though their epistemological implications have at least tended to be in the direction of naive —or direct — realism.
However, as we will suggest in our concluding comments at least Russell was himself pushed back in the direction of some form of idealism, perhaps only epistemological idealism, by the time his own thought reached the stage of his "logical atomism".
Thus, in the end there are no real obstacles to thinking of Nietzsche as an ontological as well as epistemological idealist, although the speculations that lead him in the former direction may be separable from the latter.
Despite the methodological and epistemological limitations of our approach, we hope this assessment will provide direction to the research community toward understudied topics and regions, and stimulate greater integration of often disparate fields.
Chapters 1 to 3 effectively follow a developmental series of distinct shapes of consciousness jointly epistemological and ontological attitudes articulated by criteria which are, regarded from one direction, criteria for certain knowledge, and from the other, criteria for the nature of the objects of such knowledge.
This way, ladies and gentlemen, for the epistemological minefield.
Nonetheless, since the implication holds in only one direction, skepticism about moral truth is still distinct from all kinds of epistemological moral skepticism.
Rorty's key break with the pragmatists is a fundamental one; to Haack's mind, by situating himself in opposition to the epistemological orientation of modern philosophy, Rorty ends up dismissing the very project that gave direction to the works of the American pragmatists.
The point is that there may be no principled reason to exclude this possibility for the future direction of science and that there may be principled reasons to allow it, given the epistemological implications of moral naturalism.
It's an epistemological argument.
