This reads to me like you’re confusing the differences between epistemology and experience and metaphysics and reality. The formers are studies of the latters. I agree that reality exists first and then experience is something that happens inside reality: this is specifically the existentialist view of reality that stuff exists before it has meaning and is contrasted with the essentialist view that meaning causes stuff to exist.
The point that epistemology precedes metaphysics is that, because you exist inside reality and know it only through experience inside of it, understanding how you know must come before understanding what you know. To be concrete, I know that 1 + 1 = 2, but I learned this information by experiencing that combining one thing and another thing gave me two things. There seems little to no evidence to support the opposite view, that I had timeless access to the knowledge of the true proposition that 1 + 1 = 2 and then was able to experience putting one thing and another together to get two things because I knew it to be true.
That we are perhaps better at metaphysics than epistemology seems beside the point that knowledge comes to us through experience.
Well if you narrow “metaphysics” down to “a priori First Philosophy”, as the example suggests—then I’m much less enthusiastic about “metaphysics”. But if it’s just (as I conceive it) continuous with science, just an account of what the world contains and how it works, we need a healthy dose of that just to get off the ground in epistemology..
This reads to me like you’re confusing the differences between epistemology and experience and metaphysics and reality. The formers are studies of the latters. I agree that reality exists first and then experience is something that happens inside reality: this is specifically the existentialist view of reality that stuff exists before it has meaning and is contrasted with the essentialist view that meaning causes stuff to exist.
The point that epistemology precedes metaphysics is that, because you exist inside reality and know it only through experience inside of it, understanding how you know must come before understanding what you know. To be concrete, I know that 1 + 1 = 2, but I learned this information by experiencing that combining one thing and another thing gave me two things. There seems little to no evidence to support the opposite view, that I had timeless access to the knowledge of the true proposition that 1 + 1 = 2 and then was able to experience putting one thing and another together to get two things because I knew it to be true.
That we are perhaps better at metaphysics than epistemology seems beside the point that knowledge comes to us through experience.
Well if you narrow “metaphysics” down to “a priori First Philosophy”, as the example suggests—then I’m much less enthusiastic about “metaphysics”. But if it’s just (as I conceive it) continuous with science, just an account of what the world contains and how it works, we need a healthy dose of that just to get off the ground in epistemology..