The doctrine of the Fall in seventeenth-century reformed scholasticism: philosophy between faith and scepticism

This is how the contemporary analytic philosopher David Chalmers describes mankind’s epistemic situation in the Garden of Eden. Sure enough, ‘we no longer live in Eden. Perhaps Eden never existed, and perhaps it could not have existed. But Eden still plays a powerful role in our perceptual experience’ (Chalmers, 2006, p. 49). What role? Eden symbolises the ideal situation in which ‘the objects and their properties are revealed to us directly’. This means that we can know things as they really are – one of the long-lasting dreams of the philosophers throughout the centuries.