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 or science. The basis for this
view, however, lies in a serious misinterpretation of the
past, a projection of modern concerns onto past events.
The idea of an autonomous discipline called "philosophy,"
distinct from and sitting in judgment on such pursuits as
theology and science turns out, 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, but rather as furthering "the warfare between
science and theology." They were fighting, albeit
discreetly, to open the intellectual world to the new
science and to liberate intellectual life from ecclesiastical
philosophy and envisioned their work as contributing to
the growth, not of philosophy, but of research in
mathematics and physics. This link 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
provoked 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
it means to know something. Modern philosophers now
trace that notion back at least to Descartes and Spinoza,
but it was not explicitly articulated until the late
eighteenth century, by Kant, and did not become built into
the structure of academic institutions and the standard
self-descriptions of philosophy professors 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
sciences" into the new notion of philosophy as a separate,
foundational discipline: philosophy became "primary" no
longer in the sense of "highest" but in the sense of
"underlying".