There are many ways of asking epistemological questions. For example: What can I know and how do I know that that is knowing? What kind of evidence is necessary in order to make valid knowledge claims? What counts as certainty? What is the relationship between opinion and knowledge? What is the structure of the knower? What is the relationship between the knower and the known? What are the limits of knowledge? What is Truth? What is the relationship between the universal and the particular, between sensation and our faculty of judgment? etc. You may well ask, what is the point of all this when all it seems to do is to make your head swim around in circles? If everything turns into a question are we not left like the dog chasing it's tail? Before we proceed with this question and look to it for a clue to a possible starting point, let us first of all interrogate the alternative question. What if I don't ask in some way, at some level, the epistemological question? What if I choose not to give myself over to this act of questioning, this moment of reflexive self-presence in knowledge? It is my contention that I will then be simply pushed around by whatever prevailing opinion happens to be in fashion. My judgments with regard to truth and value will be made for me by the "they-world" that I naively consent to. Consensus reality will be my chosen horizon and I will aesthetically drift from one opinion to the next sunk in the mire of "the public", never putting my epistemic foot down and leaping over the bridge of access to the real, namely, judgment, decision, action. To be sure, I will no doubt gather an habitual cluster of insights out of which I will live my life, and if the opinions and tastes which give texture to my life happen to be good ones, no doubt things will go well with me. I may even grow into my full stature as a human being, but it will be an accident. The choice is not whether or not to have an epistemology, but between naively held epistemic conformity or this more or less thematic act of asking the question about questioning itself. The question about questioning itself! I may not ask this basic question of epistemology in quite this way or bring it to the surface articulated in this manner. But, whenever I ask about truth or value, or struggle with doubt, or find myself amazed by existence or overwhelmed by its plenitude. Whenever I find myself wondering about just how everything hangs together, or how A is related to B, or how much I can get away with not knowing on an exam, I am flirting with that area of philosophical inquiry known as epistemology or the theory of knowledge. Sometimes other people seem to know so much more than I do and my poor little brain can't even formulate it's own questions very well. It seems that the more we learn or know about a given area of inquiry, the more we know that we don't know very much at all. In this experience of being overwhelmed there is a kind of existential dizziness that can either send us running scared back to the security of our familiar world with its unquestioned everyday certainties; or open our hearts and our minds to amazement, wonder, the love of learning, and the quest for knowledge. Not as way of taking refuge from the onslaught of the mystery and the poverty of our non-knowing, but as a way of standing at the edges of the known gazing in awe out into the endless reaches of the unknown. The first step is to begin to unpack my naively held epistemic horizons and to bring them under the gaze of critical thought. The second step is to examine the pre-given structure of the life-world that is the necessary horizon of all inquiry and living, and to ask how much, if any, certainty is possible or necessary. The third step is to build up a nexus of post-critical affirmations about truth and value, out of which I can authentically make judgments and live my life. The fourth step is authentic self-transcendence in love, and in this fourth step is found the beginning again of step one. What is the relationship between epistemology and everyday life ? Of what possible relevance could the study of epistemology have to real life? Isn't this just a bunch of navel gazing? One way to concretize the epistemological enterprise is to unpack the knowledge claims and epistemic assumptions that underlie the basic conceptual frameworks that are assumed by our culture. One way of doing this is to compare a Eurocentric view of the natural world with that of traditional aboriginal cultures. Another way is to examine the mathematical assumptions and the omnicompetence of modern science, or the underlying assumptions of historical mindedness. Another everyday approach to the threshold of epistemology is to ask about the impact of a given technology on our world-view, especially the cultural shifts involved in a communications technology such as the printing press or the computer. Whatever our approach to the theory of knowledge, the knower asks the question about knowing. Unless I am committed ahead of time to complete skepticism, and wish to make the claim that there are absolutely no absolutes, I am already caught in the circle of questions and answers. Epistemology is just the attempt to make this circle thematic, to bring it forward, to pay attention to its dynamics, to grasp its certainties, and to be at home with its ambiguities.