Epistemology

Should the democratic exercise of authority that we take for granted in the realm of government be extended to the managerial sphere? Exploring this question, Christopher McMahon develops a theory of government and management as two components of an...

Each of the fourteen essays in this volume is directed to some aspect of these two questions: What are the peculiarities of the concepts that we use to describe and to criticize the mental states and performances of human beings? What are the...

Is truth objective or relative? What exists independently of our minds? This book is about these two questions. The essays in its pages variously defend and critique answers to each, grapple over the proper methodology for addressing them, and wonder...

Jonathan Ichikawa develops a contextualist semantics for knowledge ascriptions, and shows how it can illuminate foundational questions in epistemology. He argues that in thinking clearly about knowledge, epistemologists must also think about the dynamic...

Meaning, Understanding, and Practice is a selection of the most notable essays of a leading contemporary philosopher on a set of central topics in the subject. Barry Stroud offers penetrating studies of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the...

Oxford Cognitive Science Series General Editors: Martin Davies, Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK, James Higginbotham , Professor of General Linguistics, University of Oxford, UK, John O'Keefe, Professor of Cognitive...

Georges Dicker here provides a commentary on John Locke's masterwork, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding-the foundational work of classical Empiricism. Dicker's commentary is an accessible guide for students who are reading Locke for the first time;...

Most of the research on the epistemology of perception has focused on visual perception. This is hardly surprising given that most of our knowledge about the world is largely attributable to our visual experiences. The present volume is the first to...

The result of the author's extensive practical experience: a decade in computer process control using large scale systems, another decade in machine pattern-recognition for vision systems, and nearly a decade dealing with artificial intelligence and...

One goal of epistemology is to refute the skeptic. Another, with an equally dist- guished if briefer pedigree, is to make sense of science as a knowledge-acquiring enterprise. The goals are incompatible, in that the latter presupposes that the skeptic is...

How has technology changed what it means to be human and to be a member of a human society? How has technology changed the way we acquire knowledge of the world we inhabit? In light of these changes and the direction we are moving, how should the...

In Using Knowledge: On the Rationality of Science, Technology, and Medicine Ingemar Nordin analyses the philosophical problems and nature of science, technology, and medicine. The main focus of the book is on the structure and dynamics of technological...

Because it laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent epistemologies, Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" has overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which scholars have long considered as separate from his...

How do people form beliefs, and how should they do so? This book presents seventeen new essays on these questions, drawing together perspectives from philosophy and psychology. The first section explores the ethics of belief from an individualistic...

One of the hardest problems in the history of Western philosophy has been to explain whether and how experience can provide knowledge (or even justification for belief) about the objective world outside the experiencer's mind. A prominent brand of...

Kevin Scharp proposes an original theory of the nature and logic of truth on which truth is an inconsistent concept that should be replaced for certain theoretical purposes. Replacing Truth opens with an overview of work on the nature of truth (e.g.,...

This volume offers a view of the current state of play in epistemology, in the form of twelve new essays by some of the philosophers who have most influenced the course of debates in recent years. Topics include epistemic justification, solipsism,...

That there are no white ravens is true because there are no white ravens. And so there is a sense in which that truth 'depends on the world'. But this sort of dependence is trivial. After all, it does not imply that there is anything that is that truth's...

This book presents a critique of Derrida from a Nietzschean perspective. Questioning the often-advertised association between Nietzsche and Derrida, it focuses instead on important differences and incompatibilities between Nietzsche's naturalistic...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.About the AuthorMark Neocleous is professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, and a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. His...

Afrosofian Knowledge and Cheikh Anta Diop: Geo-Ethical and Political Implications wrestles with the cultural, epistemological, ethical, and geopolitical conundrums of our contemporary world. The book offers fresh conceptual and dialogical frameworks that...

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have...

When and why is it right to kill? When and why is it wrong? Torbjoern Tannsjoe examines three theories on the ethics of killing in this book: deontology, a libertarian moral rights theory, and utilitarianism. The implications of each theory are worked...

Rational Belief provides conceptions of belief and knowledge, offers a theory of how they are grounded, and connects them with the will and thereby with action, moral responsibility, and intellectual virtue. A unifying element is a commitment to...

The term scientism is used in several ways. It is used to denote an epistemological thesis according to which science is the source of our knowledge about the world and ourselves. Relatedly, it is used to denote a methodological thesis according to which...

Naturalistic cognitive science, when realistically rendered, rightly maintains that to think is to deploy contentful mental representations. Accordingly, conscious perception, memory, and anticipation are forms of cognition that, despite their...

"Pluhar maintains a fine, even tone throughout. . . . Those who have found the prospect of teaching the third Critique daunting will admire its clarity. . . . No one will be disappointed." -Timothy Sean Quinn, The Review of Metaphysics Contents:Foreword...

The notion of truth has become much discussed in philosophy over the last few decade, with many senior figures grappling with the relativist and constructivist notions of truth popular in other parts of the academy. It continues to be a subject enjoying...

After a Darwinian-type account of what beliefs are and how they arose in animals acting to cope with their environments--"low beliefs," virtually all of which are true--Wallace Matson here shows how the invention of language led to imagination and thence...

Technology is a host of social, material, and epistemic transformation techniques, tools, and methods. The common perception of digital technology today is that it is determined, even over-determined. This volume suggests a different view: the digital is...

Anil Gupta asks one of the key questions in philosophy: what is the contribution of experience of knowledge? Gupta develops an account of experience that allows it to inform knowledge while respecting two constraints - the contribution of experience to...

Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to understand human cognition and agency. What is the...

In present-day America, the topic of certitude is much debated. On one side, commentators like Charles Krauthammer urge us to achieve "moral clarity." On the other, those like George Will contend that the greatest present threat to civilization is an...

In this book Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski gives an extended argument that the self-reflective person is committed to belief on authority. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic self-reliance is incoherent. She argues that epistemic...

What if anything justifies us in believing the testimony of others? How should we react to disagreement between ourselves and our peers, and to disagreement among the experts when we ourselves are novices? Can beliefs be held by groups of people in...

Ever since Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, epistemology has been haunted by external world skepticism, the view that no one knows or even has reason to believe anything about the world around us. Generations of epistemologists have responded...

The study of sport is characterised by its inter-disciplinarity, with researchers drawing on apparently incompatible research traditions and ethical benchmarks in the natural sciences and the social sciences, depending on their area of specialisation. In...

David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology - the philosophy of knowledge. It is also a classic of the critical thinking skills of analysis and reasoning. Analysis is all...

Gilbert Ryle's 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase "the ghost in the machine" - a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are separate. His own position was that mental acts are not...

DRETSKE AND HIS CRITICS Dretske and his Critics Frederick Dretske's views on the nature of seeing, the possibility of knowledge, the nature of content or non-natural meaning, the nature of behavior, and the role of content in the causal explanation of...