The Understanding of Reality

Abstract

Before the presentation of Temple’s suggested synthesis to the epistemological problem, it may be well to review briefly the problem as he has developed it. Descartes’ emphasis on the self isolated from everything else and, thus, necessarily dependent on its own ideas for knowledge of the world has been shown to be fallacious. But it is not desirable nor possible to return to the naïve realism prevalent in the medieval period which claimed that the mind is directly aware of real objects in experience and gains direct knowledge of the world. The latter represents the thesis in the triadic attempt to solve the problems of epistemology revealed in the history of thought, of which Descartes’ proposal is the antithesis.