Elements of Epistemology
	Chapter I Socrates and Plato
	Chapter II Corpus Aristotelicum
	Chapter III Laughing and Weeping Philosophers
	Chapter IV Skepticism and Stoicism
	Chapter V Scholastic Epistemology
	Chapter VI Friar Roger and Sir Francis Bacons
	Chapter VII Cosmology and Epistemology
	Chapter VIII Classic Protagonists of Epistemology
	Chapter IX The Sociologists
	Chapter X Logical Positivism and Beyond ...

Aristotles Diagrams   Aristotle (c. 9650 HE; 350 BCE) who was among the students of Plato, is one of the fathers of visual statistics, as he used diagrams to illustrate points of explanation. Among these diagrams is a series of concentric spheres:

         Geosphere (Earth at the center of the Universe)
    Hydrosphere (Earth's oceans)
    Atmosphere (Air surrounding the Earth)
    Pyrosphere (Sphere generating lightning)
    Stellarsphere (Stars above the Earth)

with the prime mover (the first cause) initiating their spinning motion. Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) replaced the Aristotles pyrosphere with his concept of noosphere. He reasoned that while evolution diversified the living forms, humankind reversed this divergent process into a convergent one. While many species are on the verge of extinction, the diverse human cultures are converging toward the omega point. Teilhard de Chardin predicted that after reaching the omega point, humankind will cover the Earth's surface with collective human consciousness, the noosphere (from Greek noos, mind), superimposed on the already-existing biosphere. He elaborated these concepts in an effort to reconcile Darwins theory of evolution with the Biblical teachings. He did not date to publish his private manuscripts (published after his death in books The Phenomenon of Man (1955), The Divine Milieu (1957), The Future of Man (1959), and Hymn of the Universe (1964)). However, these manuscripts were discovered in his study. Professor's Chardin was fired from the Parisian Institut Catholique and immigrated to China. Pierre de Chardin did not live long enough to witness the emergence of the Internet, or his noosphere in action.

Corpus Aristotelicum The collected works of Aristotle, Corpus Aristotelicum, are divided into logic, physics, and metaphysics. The metaphysics consists of teleology, epistemology, cosmology, ontology, and ethics. Aristotle thought that every entity in the universe moves toward a goal, teleos, inherent in its nature. The principle subjects of teleology thus are development and change. Materialists understood these as mutually interconnected causal chains of events. The idealists thought that these chains of events must have been initiated and guided by a spiritual, supernatural principle, the ultimate source and cause of all things and events. From these deliberations, philosophy developed along two parallel lines. One was realistic and secular, the other was idealistic and religious. The realistic tradition maintains that the concept of supernatural original cause is redundant, unnecessary to understand our world and the meaning of our existence. The idealistic tradition maintains that in order to understand the world and the meaning of our existence, the concept of God is necessary. The next question then is, how we can know that God exists? This used to be the central question of epistemology, the Greek episteme meaning 'to know.'