SUBJECT-CENTERED EPISTEME IN MODERNITY AND ITS DECONSTRUCTION

A subject, Aristotle tells us, is “that of which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else”1. Here, in the Aristotle's idea of subject we have the genesis of the western conceptualization of subject. But it was Descartes who's account of mind-body distinction led to the emergence of modern notion of subject. His dualism on one hand gave rise to idealism and on the other to materialism. And we have long list of philosophers in both the camps: Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx etc. However much contending their views are, all of these philosophers together came to present a “subject-centered” account of epistemology, which is a hall-mark of modernity. Here in this paper, in the first part I shall unpack some of these philosophers' notion of “subject” along with the concept of “modernity”, in order to arrive at the comprehensive understanding of “subject-centered episteme”. Following which, in the second part, I shall briefly discuss the shortcomings of such an account and its criticism in postmodernism, with special reference to Derrida's account of deconstruction. In the third and the last section of the paper I shall present the conclusion.