There’s a method in everything. For ancient Greek philosophers, the method of their search, questions, and how they approach the matter of human reasoning became questionable itself as they realized how most of their ventures were collectively starting with a ‘How’ and yet, ‘How could they know that?’. As the debate regarding how reasonable is our reasoning kept evolving, the inquiries about the nature of knowledge – how do we know what we know and whether what we know is true – became immersive in Western philosophy, forming the theory of knowledge; now known as Epistemology. The term, like most other terms in philosophy, is derived from the Greek, epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”).
Since then, the ideology was segregated into two further categories and historically significant debates, empiricism – which states that knowledge comes from experience and primary physical sensations; and rationalism – which considers the faculty of human reason as the ultimate source of knowledge. This division was the spectacle for various schools of philosophy until the 19th century. Modern epistemology deals with numerous other domains and concepts such as truth, belief and behaviorism, and the types of knowledge we can possibly acquire.
