world vision that they offer. They are pre-epistemological. In disputes between
rival positions, commonsense standards are relied on, along with rhetorical
devices such as argument by analogy. It is much the same when philosophical
argument begins on religious, ethical, or political issues rather than cosmologi-
cal ones. When the acuteness of argument intensifies as the intergenerational
chains of intellectual specialists lengthen, the subject of knowledge itself be-
comes a topic—a notch upward in the sequence of reflexivity. Here too the
initial statements are dogmatic assertions about the proper form of knowledge.
The early Nyaya sutras simply list the kinds of knowledge: sense perception,
inference, analogy, textual authority. On a similar level is the first classification
of types of knowledge by al-Baqillani (965 c.e.), about eight generations into
the Islamic sequence. The Neo-Confucians declare that knowledge comes from
the investigation of things, but the reasons why this should be the preferred
form of knowledge are not articulated. Whenever a new epistemological direc-
tion emerges, it tends at first to be baldly asserted: Roger Bacon—after a period
of acute discussion over knowledge of universals—propagandizes for experi-
ment and experience by declaring that they bring complete certitude.
Assertive epistemologies may be elaborated into descriptive epistemologies.
The nature of knowledge is described in an ontological or psychological mode.
In India the Jainas regarded ignorance as a substance, a kind of dust clinging
to the soul and obscuring its original purity of knowledge. The early Samkhya
school held knowledge to be based on a beam carrying a physical impression
from an object to the eye. Neoplatonists and Platonizing Aristoteleans, from
late Greek antiquity through their medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian
successors, treated knowledge descriptively as a realm of ideas emanating from
God or the highest principle; taking this for granted, they debated instead
whether the human intellect was part of a single world-soul. Logic emerged
everywhere as a specialized kind of descriptive epistemology; on this turf a
version of the scholastic classification game was pursued much as on the terrain
of world ingredient ontologies.
None of these descriptive epistemologists raises critical questions about
whether these forms of knowledge are indeed really knowledge. Critical epis-
temology arose in an antagonistic vein. In the Islamic world, it was forwarded
by anti-rationalist Sufis or theological conservatives, such as al-Ghazali, who
rejects the entire Greek corpus, along with the rational theology of Islamic
kalam, by exposing their lack of epistemological foundations; and Ibn Taymi-
yah, who critiques syllogistic reasoning as empty because of its glib assumption
of universal premises and self-evident propositions. The impulse to critical
epistemology is episodic, rising at certain periods (e.g., the times of Socrates,
Descartes, Kant) and often falling back into a further round of descriptive
epistemology. Ibn Taymiyah’s criticisms did not stick; despite the victory of808 •^ Meta-reflections