ABSTRACT
Foundationalism is a view which finds expression in Descartes, the British Empiricists, and in Kant and the subsequent Kantian tradition. Among contemporary philosophers it has been articulated, in various forms, by such major empiricist philosophers as Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, C. J. Ducasse, A. J. Ayer, Axel Hägerstrom, C. I. Lewis, and Roderick Chisholm. Traditional epistemology seeks to make a judgment on the world from a position of detachment essentially untangled in cultural and historical biases or preconceptions. Moreover, (contra the skeptic) the world, putative knowledge of which hope to assess, is taken to be an objective world in which the facts are what they are independently of their being known or believed or said or thought to be that way by anyone. Formal foundationalism is the "view that justification depends on the availability of terminating beliefs or judgments, which amount to knowledge or are at least reasonably held to without support from further empirical beliefs.".
