theological conservatism, logic, almost alone of the Greek heritage, survived
as a staple of the curriculum in the orthodox madrasas. Hume’s acute episte-
mological standards were superseded in popular estimation for several genera-
tions thereafter by Scottish common-sense philosophy, which hypothesized a
faculty of common sense (a descriptive epistemology) as if it were a solution
to critical difficulties. Such retrogression in the level of epistemological analysis
is common. It is obscured by the high prestige of epistemological questions in
the twentieth century, and the resulting tendency to read the history of our
classics selectively as a movement from one peak of critical epistemology to
another.
The epistemology-metaphysics sequence is itself a version of the abstrac-
tion-reflexivity sequence. It is driven by the same general process of opposition
within the intellectual attention space and reorganization at a higher level of
abstraction. Critical epistemology is a higher order of reflexivity; it is second-
order epistemology, structured by conscious reflection on the first-order knowl-
edge methods of previous generations.
Epistemology entwines with successive levels of metaphysical abstraction.
Critical epistemology is a highway to higher metaphysical schemes. The Soph-
ists’ controversy, culminating in Socrates and Plato explicitly formulating the
question of standards of objective knowledge, soon resulted in the creation of
new ontologies: Plato’s universe of Forms, Aristotle’s more complex mixture
of Forms and the world ingredient cosmologies, along with several rival
metaphysical systems. Similarly in India, the grander metaphysical abstrac-
tions, from the successive Buddhist systems through the Hindu Advaita and its
dualist rivals, were produced with the tools of immediately preceding episte-
mological acuteness. Even in China, where the epistemology sequence did not
get very far, the epistemological querying of the School of Names was soon
followed by the appropriation of namelessness as an ontological category in
the Tao Te Ching.
At times the development of epistemology threatens to bring metaphysics
to a halt. Francis Bacon, setting knowledge on the path to empirical accumu-
lation, aims to destroy philosophical abstraction. Bacon’s is an asserted epis-
temology, not a critical one. Descartes sets up explicitly critical standards with
a similar aim of replacing old philosophy with new science. Nevertheless, the
result is not to end abstract philosophy but to underscore the separation of
science and philosophy as distinct branches, and within philosophy to provide
tools by which metaphysics undergoes a spectacular revival. We see this re-
peatedly. Modern Europe, where critical epistemologies become increasingly
central, goes through a consequent series of new and esoteric metaphysical
constructions. Kant, who makes the notion of “critical” philosophy and theory
of knowledge central to the enterprise of philosophy, does not succeed in his
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^809