There are many ways of “knowing” reality. Others might use different or broader descriptions, but I’m going to describe seven ways here. By ways of knowing I mean how we come to see what we see. This topic was traditionally the beginning course for all studies in philosophy and went by the word epistemology. It was the first philosophy course we seminarians took. We had to reflect on how we knew, before we could clearly see what we knew, which was called metaphysics. We had to recognize our own lenses and biases before we described what we saw, or we could not trust what we said we saw.
