On ImNotHerzog's recommendation...I've been reading the Aristotelian/Thomist scholar Edward Feser for between 6 and 15 months (my memory fails). I've finally reached an understanding...though after my conclusion, I went out and read some others...some of whom see the problem similarly to me.
I find Feser's critiques of folks like Rosenburg to be relatively solid...you can't play in philosophy by saying: science is all we need to know.
The traditional, Aristotle-Thomas-Rand-Feser notion of philosophy is: Metaphysics first. Then Epistemology. Then Ethics. Etc.
This approach is wrong, and no longer tenable. Question number ONE is "how do I go about deciding what to believe". You CANNOT, after Descartes, start from the place the great thinkers of the past start from. Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas all (IIRC) start from metaphysics. The problem is...once you've heard the questions of Descartes and Hume you can't start (in philosophy) from metaphysics any more. Epistemology is the central question. Everything else comes after.
Feser seems to be the pre-eminent modern defender of the metaphysics-first approach that Aristotle takes. If he'd been writing 400 (even 362) years ago...this would have been a marvelous way of thinking...and he'd have been considered brilliant. Now...it's as if he's writing about health, but missing germ theory. Sure, you can write very intelligently about health missing germ theory...but not for very long.
I have not yet read Feser's book. But even some of the sympathetic reviews (Feser's response) I've read suggest that my analysis above is pretty solid, and I'm likely to encounter the same problem in his book.
Summary position: Feser starts wrong in philosophy. Rand, with her superb ability to identify problems with opposing positions (much less woth her own) would have correctly called his approach "intrisicist", as opposed to the also-wrong "subjectivist" or correct "objectivist". While I find the distinction terribly important, and correctly leveled...I think that the problem is earlier. Deductive logic is wrong SO often that one cannot rely upon it as a path to truth without feedback systems. Indeed...even if you don't take the hyper-radical Aretaevian skepticism route...you're still left with the questions of epistemology...and the inductive challenge to deductive logic: You're wrong a lot, even when you sound right. Why should I believe you this time?
Philosophers would love to say that the truth is evident...but my feedback system says no. The feedback system on deductive logic applied to ANYTHING outside of math/formal logic is atrocious, and it's results are at least as bad. [quibbles about simple physics like orbital calculations ignored].
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I've been thinking about an "epistemology-first" approach for some time. Under that approach, my opinion of metaphysics is that it is a catch-all category for questions that we cannot yet approach with any epistemological surety. Once we have some means of really addressing a question it is no longer metaphysics, but cosmology or physics.
William,
Well said.
I'm not even quite sure what metaphysics is supposed to be. However...
"Hey, let's figure out the right metaphysics!"
"With what? We don't have epistemology yet."
"Well...you see...uhhh..."
Oddly, physics doesn't provide a good metaphysics. However, I consider it the only primer on ontology.
Alrenous,
My read of the line before Descartes is that no one asked the question set around epistemology.
"What is true" was the start-point. You can see that the tree is green, that is truth.
As far as I can tell...the question "how do we know" was discovered by Descartes, with Bacon, Locke, and Hume doing most of the excavation where they found the rest of the good questions.
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