a residue of outworn religious beliefs. What needs emphasis is that philosophy
since 1600 has been as creative on its own turf as at any time during world
history. The conditions which produced the ideology of the death of philosophy
have given philosophy new materials with which to re-create itself. The gen-
erations from 1600 to 1665 believed that their new philosophy, which con-
sisted of natural science, would completely replace the old; yet the last genera-
tion of the 1600s saw the greatest outburst of metaphysical system-building in
centuries, culminating shortly after 1700 in one of the most extreme idealisms
in history, Berkeley’s. The Enlightenment Encyclopedists recapitulated the at-
tack in the more secularizing mode, to be immediately upstaged by the German
Idealists.
Science and secularization rearranged but did not replace a core philosophi-
cal network that had carried down its own concepts and problems from earlier
periods. Metaphysics is not exhausted by theology, nor does it fold without
overlap into scientific cosmology. Nor even, despite the claims of political
intellectuals from Marx’s time to our own, does it disappear into politics.
Philosophy is an analytical region which is revealed all the more sharply when
religious dogmas as well as models of nature are stripped off into specialized
sectors of the intellectual world; and this is so whether philosophers think they
are doing metaphysics or science. Epistemology is not part of the core activity
of scientists; it is part of philosophers’ turf to argue over the bases of knowl-
edge, however knowledge may be exemplified in a particular period. Thus we
find philosophers of science, such as Bacon and Descartes, who want nothing
better than to destroy philosophical argument and promote science, but whose
effect is to make epistemology a creative center for the philosophical field.
Splitting off secularized political ideologies and specialized social sciences goes
along with sharpening the focus on value theory inside philosophy, giving it
more autonomous content than it had in the days when it was circumscribed
by theological orthodoxy and authoritarian rule. Hence the militancy of vari-
ous kinds of modern value theory, from Hegelians, Marxists, and Utilitarians
down to existentialists and postmodernists.
The differentiation of specialties from the philosophical networks lays bare
the inner terrain of abstract reflexivity which makes up the intellectual field.
Philosophy, re-creating its own space in the midst of the others, increasingly
builds what is distinctively its own.A Cascade of Creative Circles
The skeletal structure of creativity is its network lineages, and the history of
modern philosophy can be traced through a surprisingly small number of social
circles (see Figure 10.1 and its continuation in Figures 11.1, 12.1 and 12.2,526 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths