¹ Aristotle, , Ethica Nicomachea, (Works, vol. 2. ed. by Bekker, I.. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960 [± 325 BCE])Google Scholar 1097a, 1097b.

² Heidegger, Martin, Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens (In Zur Sache des Denkens. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 14. Franfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007 [1964]), 70Google Scholar.

³ These philosophers' positions have emerged in intellectual contexts, of course, and have not arisen ex nihilo.

⁴ Alternatively, an account from a non-scientific source that is not (presumably) available or even imaginable, such as those propounded by religions, may in the same way provide a solution non-philosophically, but it goes without saying that the question whether such an account is at all possible is not universally answered in the affirmative.

⁵ Perhaps a basic error is to presume that a definitive account, one that transcends the various approaches under the general banner of epistemology, is possible at all. These approaches are all characterized by some feature that is not shared universally (those known as ‘coherentists’ disagreeing with those whose view is dubbed ‘foundationalist’, for example, or those who present an ‘internalist’ approach with those who adhere to an ‘externalist’ outlook). This is an important issue, but not pursued here.

⁶ Gettier, Edmund, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, Analysis, vol. 23, no. 6 (1963), 121–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.

⁷ Dretske, Fred, ‘Conclusive Reasons’, Australiasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 1 (1971), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.

⁸ Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 264Google Scholar: ‘[…] the notion of philosophy as having foundations is as mistaken as that of knowledge having foundations.’

⁹ James, William, Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1907])Google Scholar, Lecture II, 28.

¹⁰ William James, Pragmatism, op. cit., Lecture II, 37.

¹¹ I have already pointed to the difficulties involved with this notion and will merely remark that a critical stance vis-à-vis the sciences is no less warranted than in the case of philosophy and that one may perhaps say that ‘[…] it is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured.’ (Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar), ‘normal science’ meaning here ‘[…] the research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.’ (Thomas Kuhn, op. cit., 10).

¹² Thus acting against Popper's precept that an empirical system should be falsifiable (Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 92Google Scholar).

¹³ That this is philosophy's path is, incidentally, pleaded by Quine (Van Orman Quine, Willard, Epistemology Naturalized (In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 69–90. New York, NY/London: Columbia Press, 1969), 75–78Google Scholar, 82–84), but he focuses on only part of what philosophy is, so that his analysis is too narrow to conclude that philosophy is already ‘dissolved’.

¹⁴ I leave it to the reader to decide whether I have managed to avoid this myself and the present article has not succumbed to the same problem and must request him or her to base the judgment on the given that I have earnestly attempted to include only those references that actually contribute something.