PHI 611 Epistemology Project Annotated Bibliography
Knowing Real Essences vs. mere Ideas: A Phenomenological Epistemological Look
This project will explore contemporary Catholic responses to modern empiricist epistemology. In particular, responding to the claim by some such as John Locke that we cannot know the real essences of things but only invent nominal ones. I will use Robert Sokolowski and K.T. Gallagher as well as Locke to explore this critique and respond to it to show how a basic insight of the ancient and medieval tradition can still be defended in modern times.
Bibliography
Sokolowski, Robert. Phenomenology of the Human Person. New York: Cambridge, 2008. Sokolowski argues in this work from a phenomenological perspective that we can know the true “intelligibilities” of things and not mere ideas and explores how we come to such knowledge particularly through syntactic articulation.
Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding ed. Jonathan Bennet, 2017, at earlymoderntexts.com. Locke’s famous essay argues that while things do have real essences, what we know are the mere nominal essences which we invent. True essences are unknown to us and the object of our knowledge are ideas.
Gallagher, K.T. The Philosophy of Knowledge. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986. Gallagher gives a modern summary of the various epistemological views from a Catholic perspective. Gallagher defends a moderate realism in which we do know essences of things but only partially and not fully. This is similar to Sokolowski’s view.