Over the centuries, beginning with the classic Greeks through the trends of the mid-20th century, philosophical enterprise has been intricately and seemingly irretrievably rooted in the theory of the given—an edification of philosophy as that giant mirror and standard for measuring what counts as knowledge; but is it thus synonymous with or reducible to epistemology? How or why? There are two answers to both of these questions. The attempt in this work is to delineate those separate concerns, their areas of (...) convergence and disparity, but also indicated the genesis of edifying philosophy rooted in epistemology but which has been discredited in the works of some post-modernist reformers—Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, Quine, and Rorty. Against theirs, this piece shows that historically, philosophizing has had a methodology and some perceptual axioms; that it is not easy to abdicate it from this mode, no matter the will and zeal—for success is not a matter of will alone; that the post-modernists revolution is nothing new with its swollen nerves and arteries (as others before it, it soon wanes). It concludes that the urge for philosophic understanding shows no sign of abating and so the philosophical journey will probably go on and on, each stage building on and rewriting its past and ruminating specific but perennial problematic; that while some of the issues seemingly do appear resolved, others may have endured and eloped any final solution; and finally that the philosophical method and basic assumptions have seriously remained firmly even beyond post-modernist restructurers. (shrink)