Abstract

The best of twentieth century philosophy questions the basic assumptions of modernity. These works reject the classical enterprise of epistemology by undermining the twin notions of foundationalism and essentialism, as well as the perceptual metaphors for the mind upon which they have rested. In addition, they expose the supposedly value-neutral, ahistorical methods of philosophy, including conceptual analysis. The demise of the analytic/synthetic distinction, the rejection of the appeal to the given, the failure of reference theories of meaning, and the incoherence of correspondence theories of truth that go beyond Tarskian minimalism made the undermining of epistemology inevitable. Increasingly, there is the recognition that historicist claims about human knowledge and inquiry are simply unassailable and that justification is a holistic, social phenomena.