This article reviews the transition between post-Fregean anti-naturalistic epistemology and contemporary naturalistic epistemologies. It traces the revival of naturalism to Quine’s critique of the "a priori", and Kuhn’s defense of historicism, and use the arguments of Quine and Kuhn to identify a position, "traditional naturalism", that combines naturalistic themes with the claim that epistemology is a normative enterprise. Pleas for more radical versions of naturalism are articulated, and briefly confronted.

Epistemological foundationalism is best conceived as a thesis about the structure of a body of knowledge. Although its major proponents have been non-skeptics, the thesis may be construed as neutral with respect to skepticism. A modest version of epistemological foundationalism so construed might be formulated as the view that necessarily, if one has any knowledge, one has some direct knowledge, i.e., knowledge not based on other knowledge or beliefs one has, and any further knowledge one has is at least in (...) part based on one’s direct knowledge. Now suppose we make four plausible assumptions which most foundationalists would accept: each of us has knowledge, knowing entails believing, we each have at least some direct knowledge constituted by beliefs not based on other beliefs of ours, and if a person has direct knowledge on which other knowledge is based, at least some of the beliefs constituting the former are not based on other beliefs of his. Given -, epistemological foundationalism apparently entails some form of what I shall call psychological foundationalism. In its simplest form, this is the view that the structure of a person’s body of beliefs is foundational in the strong sense that some of his beliefs are not based on others, and any other beliefs he has are based on the former. (shrink)