▶︎ 0:01 How do you know things? How do you know that you know what you think you know? What is knowledge? How does it work? How do we achieve it? These are the questions of the branch of philosophy known as epistemology.
▶︎ 0:17 This is the branch of philosophy that has to do with truth and knowledge, how we achieve it, what the nature of it is, and this was the branch that largely dominated philosophy in the 17th and 18th century.
▶︎ 0:32 The reason why it became so crucial at that point was because this was the beginning of the scientific revolution. For a long time, there was one picture of the universe, one sense of how things worked, which gave us the idea of how to go about knowing things.
▶︎ 0:52 For a long time, throughout the whole Middle Ages, the picture of the universe was that the universe was created by God for us, and God wants what's best for us, so he gave us an owner's manual for human life, an instruction manual for living, which was the Bible that gave us all the information we needed. God is benevolent. God wanted us to obey the rules, and therefore, he gave us the rules.
▶︎ 1:27 If you have a book written by an omniscient being, all-knowing, who is the creator of the universe, the creator of you, the creator of humanity, and who wants what's best for you, then there is no better source of knowledge than that. The idea of going to find knowledge out for yourself, thinking things through for yourself when you have that resource is absurd. You can't possibly come close to that. Nothing you could think on your own would be a fraction of the value of that information contained in that book that has been sent to us for that purpose.
▶︎ 2:15 It'd be like going to a city you've never been before, and instead of using Google Maps, just deciding you're gonna reason out where the hotel is just by looking at the streets. No, you don't know anything about it. You can't use your own reason to figure out where things are. You use the authority. You use the Google Maps, 'cause Google Maps knows where everything is.
▶︎ 2:37 Well, the Bible was the Google Maps for human life, and you need to defer to that because it's the logical thing to do. The rational thing to do is to listen to that.
▶︎ 2:49 But during this period, people started being dissatisfied with that picture. The picture started looking like a picture instead of simply the obvious, inevitable way the universe was. And they started wanting knowledge that could make life more comfortable, more productive, that could cure diseases, that could extend human life. They wanted knowledge that they themselves came up with. And so that picture was developing cracks, and to replace it, a number of people started creating an alternative science.
▶︎ 3:38 At this time, there was no division between philosophy and science. It was all combined. The word for science was natural philosophy. There were a number of figures, like Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, who were all doing science and philosophizing about the nature of science simultaneously.
▶︎ 4:03 They were playing the game and making up the rules at the same time, which is awfully tricky. Because they were trying to figure out how we can know things when they didn't know how to figure that out. Because if you don't know how to know things, then you don't know how to figure out how to know things either. It was an incredibly disorienting time, and these philosophers had to start with very, very little.
▶︎ 4:38 But it's because of what they built that we have the world that we live in, that we have the technology that we have, that you are able to see me right now.
▶︎ 4:48 During this period, the idea of deferring to the expert, deferring to the authority was the primary notion of, was the highest epistemological status. It was the highest epistemological quality because you had the highest authority possible. But the philosophers started wanting to know things for themselves. They started to want to think things through for themselves.
▶︎ 5:13 And one philosopher, at the very beginning of this movement, who insisted on thinking everything through for himself was Rene Descartes. And when I say everything, I mean everything. He wanted to go back to the very beginning, to start from scratch, and he wanted to bring all of Western civilization with him, to start all knowledge over again from the very, very beginning.