英语语言文学 外国语言学及应用语言学9.pdf

foundations on which all other intellectual speculation has rested.The basis for this view,however,lies in a serious misinterpretation ofthe past,a projection of modern concerns onto past events.The idea of anautonomous discipline called philosophy,distinct from and sitting injudgment on such pursuits as theology and science,turns out,on closeexamination,to be of quite recent origin.When,in the seventeenth century,Descartes and Hobbes rejected medieval philosophy,they did not think ofthemselves,as modern philosophers do,as proposing a new and betterphilosophy,but rather as furthering the warfare between science andtheology.They were fighting,albeit discreetly,to open the intellectualworld to the new science and to liberate intellectual life from ecclesiasticalphilosophy,and envisioned their work as contributing to the growth,not ofphilosophy,but of research in mathematics and physics.This link betweenphilosophical interests and scientific practice persisted until the nineteenthcentury,when decline in ecclesiastical power over scholarship and changesin the nature of science provoked the final separation of philosophy fromboth.The demarcation of philosophy from science was facilitated by thedevelopment in the early nineteenth century of a new notion,thatphilosophys core interest should be epistemology,the general explanationof what it means to know something:Modern philosophers now trace thatnotion back at less to Descartes and Spinoza,but it was not explicitlyarticulated until the late eighteenth century,by Kant,and did not becomebuilt into the structure of academic institutions and the standardself-descriptions of philosophy professors until the late nineteenth century.第9页共16页