"To evade modern philosophy means to strip the profession of philosophy of its pretense, disclose its affiliations with the structures of powers (both rhetorical and political) rooted in the past .. " (37).
Emerson refuses modern philosophy's quest for certainty and its hope for scientific respectability.
He ingeniously refuses modern philosophy's search for foundations.
It means to do, what Emerson says and does in "The American Scholar," being self-reliant by refusing "to be captive to or caught up in the problematic and vocabulary of those who came before" (37).