avowed intention to fence off the sphere of forbidden speculation, but provides
a tool by which Idealist constructions might proceed onto that terrain. Frege,
who aims to clear up confusions by introducing a new and very general
logical formalism, and Brentano, who proposes to induce logic from empirical
psychology, are followed immediately by metaphysical constructions such as
Meinong’s realm of “subsistence” containing Golden Mountains and round
circles, and Husserl’s phenomenological hierarchy of essences and transcenden-
tal ego.
Russell’s militancy in wielding the new logical tools illustrates a general
process of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence. The brain-wracking paradoxes
which he uncovers in the theory of sets are resolved by moving to the vantage
point of a higher level of abstraction; the theory of types gives him a reflexive
position from which to look down on the confusion among heterogeneous
types of statements at the source of the contradictions. Nevertheless, Russell’s
new tools quickly become the grounds for constructing bizarre new metaphysi-
cal systems, such as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It is not ironic for the anti-
metaphysical movement of logical positivism and analytical philosophy to be
followed by a renewed outburst of metaphysics;^9 it is part of the normal
epistemology-metaphysics sequence.
If epistemologies provide food for metaphysics, the reverse is also the case.
Aquinas derives his epistemology from metaphysical assumptions; since hu-
mans cannot apprehend the angelic world of universals, their knowledge must
proceed by way of particulars. Duns Scotus, attacking both the Augustinians’
primacy of the knowledge of universals and Aquinas’s primacy of knowledge
of particulars, comes to the conclusion that the first knowledge is that of
univocal being, beyond this division. Here epistemology fuses with ontology;
critical questions of the bases of knowledge become inseparable from discus-
sions of what exists.
In recycling back onto metaphysical terrain, epistemological critique tends
to subside, and epistemology is pursued again in a descriptive vein. Locke’s
empiricism, with its attack on innate ideas and its studied distance from the
uncritically asserted materialism of the corpuscular philosophy, comes out of
the epistemological debates of the Cartesian network. Some followers treat this
as a descriptive epistemology and seek the principles of knowledge concretely
in empirical psychology. Locke’s immediate successor, Berkeley, however, con-
verts the same empiricist tools into an extreme Idealist metaphysics. Hume
starts out along the more conventional Lockean route by attempting to build
an empirical system of the human sciences, but is diverted into what for him
are side-channels of epistemological conundrums. These in turn provide the
puzzle space for Kant. The richness of modern European philosophy is this
recurrent recycling between epistemology and metaphysics.
810 •^ Meta-reflections