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Present-day philosophers usually envision their discipline as an endeavor that has been, since antiquity, distinct from and superior to any particular intellectual discipline, such as theology or science. Such philosophical concerns as the mind-body problem or, more generally, the nature of human knowledge, they believe, are basic human questions whose tentative philosophical solutions have served as the necessary foundations on which all other intellectual speculation has rested. The basis for this view, however, lies in a serious misinterpretation of the past, a projection of modern concerns onto past events. The idea of an autonomous discipline called philosophy, distinct from and sitting in judgment on such pursuits as theology and science turns out, on close examination, to be of quite recent origin. When, in the seventeenth century, Descartes and Hobbes rejected medieval philosophy, they did not think of themselves, as modern philosophers do, as proposing a new and better philosophy, but rather as furthering the warfare between science and theology. They were fighting, albeit discreetly, to open the intellectual world to the new science and to liberate intellectual life from ecclesiastical philosophy and envisioned their work as contributing to the growth, not of philosophy, but of research in mathematics and physics. This link between philosophical interests and scientific practice persisted until the nineteenth century, when decline in ecclesiastical power over scholarship and changes in the nature of science provoked the final separation of philosophy from both. | 
