the way of ideas

The first, called “the way of ideas,” represents the attempt in epistemology to provide a foundation for our knowledge of the external world (as well as our knowledge of the past and of other minds) in the mental experiences of the individual. The Cartesian theory of knowledge through…

…what was later called “the way of ideas” as a means of working out the skeptical possibilities inherent in the models of mind they had inherited from antiquity. They were followed by others who tried to reconstruct the concept of mind on a very different basis. A third such…

Plato’s conception of Ideas or essences as the true objects of knowledge had fateful implications for the way the soul was understood in both the ancient and the medieval worlds. This can be illustrated by the semantic vicissitudes of the…

…the philosophical challenges that the way of ideas would pose for this confident distinction between the characters things have in the mind and those they have outside it.

…who subscribed to it, the way of ideas had served mainly as a way of pulling high-flying abstractions down to earth by putting them to the test of sense experience. It was easy to forget that what the human senses deliver is a modification of a mental state, which is…