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Knowledge in Early Modern Philosophy

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Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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Reference Point: The Aristotelian Ideal of Knowledge

This entry offers an overview of various conceptions of knowledge and knowledge acquisition in the early modern period. The starting point of this enterprise was the Aristotelian ideal of knowledge, or as it was known in the era: scientia. Different aspects of this ideal have been criticized and refined in the period, but this ideal was the unquestionable point of reference with respect to which differing accounts of knowledge had to be situated.

According to Aristotle, scientiaconsists in a system of necessary and universal truths demonstrated via syllogisms from self-evident principles. Though demonstrativity is arguably the most enduring aspect of this ideal, but there are other aspects that are also similarly important: the relevant self-evident principles are typically about formal causes, and they provide an undisputable foundation of knowledge. Since “the proper object of unqualified scientific knowledge is something which...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary

    Krisztián Pete

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  1. Krisztián Pete
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Correspondence to Krisztián Pete .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  2. ICUB-Humanities, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  3. Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France

    Charles T. Wolfe

Section Editor information

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Martin Lenz

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Pete, K. (2022). Knowledge in Early Modern Philosophy. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31069-5_606

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