Epistemology

In this incisive study one of Britain's most eminent philosophers explores the often overlooked tension between voluntariness and involuntariness in human cognition. He seeks to counter the widespread tendency for analytic epistemology to be dominated by...

This is the first modern edition of the works of Lady Mary Shepherd, one of the most important women philosophers of the early modern period. Shepherd has been widely neglected in the history of philosophy, but her work engaged with the dominant...

Sanford C. Goldberg argues in this volume that epistemic normativity - the sort of normativity implicated in assessments of whether a belief amounts to knowledge - is grounded in the things we properly expect of one another as epistemic subjects. In...

Believers and non-believers often take it for granted that traditional religious faith is, in principle, incapable of the sort of justification which might be given to a scientific theory. Yet how are scientific theories justified and is it the case that...

For much of the past two millennia philosophers have embraced a priori knowledge and have thought that the a priori plays an important role in philosophy itself. Philosophers from Plato to Descartes, Kant to Kripke, all endorse the a priori and engage in...

Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence. Or perhaps it must be reliably formed. Or perhaps there are some other 'good-making' features...

Thoughts is a collection of twelve essays by Stephen Yablo which together constitute a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind. Yablo offers penetrating discussions of such topics as the relation between the mental and the...

Knowledge and Presuppositions develops a novel account of epistemic contextualism based on the idea that pragmatic presuppositions play a central role in the semantics of knowledge attributions. According to Blome-Tillmann, knowledge attributions are...

Paul Katsafanas explores how we might justify normative claims as diverse as 'murder is wrong' and 'agents have reason to take the means to their ends.' He offers an original account of constitutivism--the view that we can justify certain normative...

Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publicaton which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading philosophers in North America, Europe and...

The truth of an utterance depends on various factors. Usually these factors are assumed to be: the meaning of the sentence uttered, the context in which the utterance was made, and the way things are in the world. Recently, however, a number of cases...

Teleology is the belief that some things happen, or exist for the sake of other things. It is the belief that, for example, salmon swim upstream in order to spawn, and that bears have claws for the sake of catching fish. This volume takes up the...

The value of true belief has played a central role in history of philosophy--consider Socrates' slogan that the unexamined life is not worth living, and Aristotle's claim that everyone naturally wants knowledge--as well as in contemporary epistemology,...

This study examines the relationship between thought and language by considering the views of Kant and the later Wittgenstein alongside many strands of contemporary debate in the area of mental content. Building on an analysis of the nature of concepts...

Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief, called the Certainty-Loss Framework. Subjective Bayesianism is epistemologists' standard theory of how individuals should change their degrees of belief over...

The Taming of the True poses a broad challenge to the realist views of meaning and truth that have been prominent in recent philosophy. Neil Tennant starts with a careful critical survey of the realism debate, guiding the reader through its complexities;...

Knowledge by Agreement defends the ideas that knowledge is a social status (like money, or marriage), and that knowledge is primarily the possession of groups rather than individuals. Part I develops a new theory of testimony. It breaks with the...

Hartry Field presents a selection of thirteen essays on a set of related topics at the foundations of philosophy; one essay is previously unpublished, and eight are accompanied by substantial new postscripts. Five of the essays are primarily about...

This book puts forward an interpretation of rationality which is much broader than the one underlying the current polarity between analytic and continental philosophy. It will help to reaffirm a range of ideas which have long been pushed to the sidelines...

The publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer's magnum opus ""Truth and Method"" in 1960 marked the arrival of philosophical hermeneutics as a dominant force in philosophy and the humanities as a whole. ""Consequences of Hermeneutics"" celebrates the fiftieth...

Paul Horwich develops an interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later writings that differs in substantial respects from what can already be found in the literature. He argues that it is Wittgenstein's radically anti-theoretical metaphilosophy--and not...

This book is about Kant`s account of human understanding, of our capacity to form concepts of, and to be conscious of, things in the world. It argues that the conditions which Kant lays down for understanding - conditions about the autonomy of thought,...

On the traditional Cartesian picture, knowledge of one's own internal world -- of one's current thoughts and feelings -- is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge. The philosophical problem is to explain how we can move beyond this knowledge, how...

This volume is the first sustained examination of epistemic situationism: the clash between virtue epistemology and the situationist hypothesis inspired by research in empirical psychology. Situationism began as a challenge to the psychology of character...

Epistemic Evaluation aims to explore and apply a particular methodology in epistemology. The methodology is to consider the point(s) or purpose(s) of our epistemic evaluations, and to pursue epistemological theory in light of such matters. Call this...

The epistemology and the phenomenology of perception are closely related insofar as both depend on experiences of self-evident objectivity--experiences in which the objectivity of a state of affairs is evident from within our experience of that state of...

Infinitism is an ancient view in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification, according to which there are no foundational reasons for belief. The view has never been popular, and is often associated with skepticism, but...

In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the...

Luck, Value, and Commitment comprises eleven new essays which engage with, or take their point of departure from, the influential work in moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1929-2003). Various themes of Williams's work are explored and...

David Hume is famous as a sceptical philosopher but the nature of his scepticism is difficult to pin down. Hume's True Scepticism provides the first sustained interpretation of Part 4 of Book 1 of Hume's Treatise, his deepest engagement with sceptical...

Content and Justification presents a series of essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. Part one comprises essays on the nature of rule-following and its relation to the problem...

Content and Justification presents a series of essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. Part one comprises essays on the nature of rule-following and its relation to the problem...

Timothy Williamson's 2000 book Knowledge and Its Limits is perhaps the most important work of philosophy of the decade. Eighteen leading philosophers have now joined forces to give a critical assessment of ideas and arguments in this work, and the impact...

Bas C. van Fraassen presents an original exploration of how we represent the world. Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations...

Epistemology has traditionally been motivated by a desire to respond to skeptical challenges. The skeptic presents an argument for the view that knowledge is impossible, and the theorist of knowledge is called upon to explain why we should think,...

This book is devoted to articulating the connections between the nature and value of faith and humility. The goal is to understand faith and humility in a way that does not discriminate between religious and mundane contexts, between sacred and secular...

Jonathan L. Kvanvig presents a conception of rationality which answers to the need arising out of the egocentric predicament concerning what to do and what to believe. He does so in a way that avoids, on the one hand, reducing rationality to the level of...

John Gibbons presents an original account of epistemic normativity. Belief seems to come with a built-in set of standards or norms. One task is to say where these standards come from. But the more basic task is to say what those standards are. In some...

An important issue in epistemology concerns the source of epistemic normativity. Epistemic consequentialism maintains that epistemic norms are genuine norms in virtue of the way in which they are conducive to epistemic value, whatever epistemic value may...

Gila Sher approaches knowledge from the perspective of the basic human epistemic situation -- the situation of limited yet resourceful beings, living in a complex world and aspiring to know it in its full complexity. What principles should guide them?...