gre考试阅读真题解析(B)_GRE阅读

gre考试阅读真题解析(B)

　　The demarcation of philosophy from science was facilitated by the development in the early nineteenth century of a new notion, that philosophys core interest should be epistemology, the general explanation of what it means to know something. Modern philosophers now trace that notion back at least to Descartes and Spinoza, but it was not explicitly articulated until the late eighteenth century, by Kant, and did not become built into the structure of academic institutions and the standard self-descriptions of philosophy professors until the late nineteenth century. Without the idea of epistemology, the survival of philosophy in an age of modern science is hard to imagine. Metaphysics, philosophys traditional coreconsidered as the most general description of how the heavens and the earth are put togetherhad been rendered almost completely meaningless by the spectacular progress of physics. Kant, however, by focusing philosophy on the problem of knowledge, managed to replace metaphysics with epistemology, and thus to transform the notion of philosophy as queen of sciences into the new notion of philosophy as a separate, foundational discipline. Philosophy became primary no longer in the sense of highest but in the sense of underlying. After Kant, philosophers were able to reinterpret seventeenth-and eighteenth-century thinkers as attempting to discover How is our knowledge possible? and to project this question back even on the ancients.