Relativism in Early Modern Philosophy

This chapter is intended to trace variants of relativism in the early modern period from Bacon to Hume. Many philosophers in this period presuppose a distinction between divine and human knowledge. Divine knowledge counts as perfect, providing an absolute standard, in relation to which human cognition is seen as deficient. My thesis is that it is the increasing dissociation of divine and human knowledge that opens the door to relativism. If divine or essential knowledge is seen as unavailable to human cognition, it loses its status as a measure, giving more and more space to our fallible and diverse ideas, which eventually establish a standard in their own right. Once our fallible cognitive activity, rooted in our biological make-up, our customs and our linguistic conventions, is taken to set standards, it becomes conceivable that we subsume the same phenomena under competing categories.