The problem of the justification of a theory of knowledge

Summary

The article concerns the meta-epistemological problem of the justification of a theory of knowledge and provides a reconstruction of the history of its formulations. In the first section, I analyse the connections between Sextus Empiricus'diallelus, Montaigne'srouet and Chisholm's “problem of criterion”; in the second section I focus on the link between thediallelus and the Cartesian circle; in the third section I reconstruct the origin of “Fries' trilemma”; finally, in the last section I draw some general conclusions about the issuequa a general problem for a theory of knowledge.