Epistemology

The theory of truthmaking has long aroused skepticism from philosophers who believe it to be tangled up in contentious ontological commitments and unnecessary theoretical baggage. In this book, Jamin Asay shows why that suspicion is unfounded...

According to the received view in epistemology, inferential knowledge from non-knowledge is impossible - that is, in order for a subject to know the conclusion of their inference, they must know the essential premises from which that conclusion is drawn...

Knowledge closure is the claim that, if an agent S knows P, recognizes that P implies Q, and believes Q because it is implied by P, then S knows Q. Closure is a pivotal epistemological principle that is widely endorsed by contemporary epistemologists...

Standard philosophical explanations of the concept of knowledge invoke a personal goal of having true beliefs, and explain the other requirements for knowledge as indicating the best way to achieve that goal. In this highly original book, Steven L...

Peter van Inwagen, author of the classic book An Essay on Free Will (1983), has established himself over the last forty years as a leading figure in the philosophical debate about the problem of free will. This volume presents eleven influential essays...

The metaphysics of ordinary objects is an increasingly vibrant field of study for philosophers. This volume gathers insights from a number of leading authors, who together tackle the central issues in contemporary debates about the subject. Their essays...

The nature of emotion is an important question in several philosophical domains, but little attention has so far been paid to identifying the general ontological category to which emotions belong. Given that they are short-lived, are they events? Since...

We take it for granted that a person persists over time: when we make plans, we assume that we will carry them out; when we punish someone for a crime, we assume that she is the same person as the one who committed it. Metaphysical questions underlying...

How do ordinary people come to know or believe what they do? We need an account of this process to help explain why people act as they do. You might think I am acting irrationally--against my interest or my purpose--until you realize that what you know...

Barry Stroud presents nineteen of his philosophical essays written since 2001, on topics to do with knowing, seeing, and understanding. He discusses the nature of philosophy, sense experience, the possibility of perceptual knowledge, intentional action...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. We use evaluative terms...

Many people believe that philosophy makes no progress. Members of the general public often find it amazing that philosophers exist in universities at all, at least in research positions. Academics who are not philosophers often think of philosophy either...

Contextualism, the view that the epistemic standards a subject must meet in order for a claim attributing "knowledge" to her to be true do vary with context, has been hotly debated in epistemology and philosophy of language during the last few decades...

What should I do? What should I think? Traditionally, ethicists tackle the first question, while epistemologists tackle the second. Philosophers have tended to investigate the issue of what to do independently of the issue of what to think, that is, to...

In Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, Robert Hanna works out a unified contemporary Kantian theory of rational human cognition and knowledge. Along the way, he provides accounts of (i) intentionality and its contents, including non-conceptual content...

For most of the twentieth century, philosophers have explored the nature and extent of our knowledge-especially our knowledge of the world grounded in sense-perceptual experience. Can we be sure that our experience of the world is enough to ground our...

Shortly after composing his Opus maius, Opus minus, and Opus tertium (1267) Bacon felt the need once again to call attention to obstacles to the achievement of wisdom placed by the Church, academia, and civil society in the early 1270s. This he did in...

The striking extent of religious disagreement suggests that religious conviction is very often the result of processes that do not reliably produce true beliefs. For this reason, many have argued that the only rational response to religious disagreement...

The most important questions in life are questions about what we should do and what we should believe. The first kind of question has received considerable attention by normative ethicists, who search for a complete systematic account of right action...

The credence framework is used by scientists and social scientists in almost all disciplines, including economics and political theory, and it underpins policy choice in healthcare, transport, education, and numerous other areas. It is hard to...

This volume reprints eight of Anil Gupta's essays, some with additional material. The essays bring a refreshing new perspective to central issues in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology. Gupta argues that logical interdependence...

Philosophical thinking about truth has revolved around two key questions. First, what is the nature of truth? Second, why should we value it? It has proven difficult to answer both questions at once. Some theories analyse truth in terms of goodness...

John Stuart Mill was one of the most important and influential philosophers of the nineteenth century. He was also someone who exemplified a view about the meaning of life that is widespread among both philosophers and nonacademics: that projects are...

Externalism about knowledge is thriving in contemporary epistemology. Nonetheless, externalism is too often caricatured as merely reliabilism, too often reduced to simply externalism about justification, and rarely considered as a cohesive family of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781587314490Author Michael GelvenFormat HardbackPage Count 144Imprint St. Augustine's PressPublisher St. Augustine's Press

"Real" knowing always involves a political dimension, Linda Martin Alcoff suggests. But this does not mean we need to give up realism or the possibility of truth. Recent work in continental philosophy insists on the influence that power and desire exert...

First published in 1930, The Art of Study is addressed to all who are old enough and young enough to regard the winning of knowledge as fine art. Like other arts, it can be helped by science. The book discusses reasons for the success and failure of...

In this volume, historians, critics, and theorists review 3000 years of apocalyptic thought. Tracing the history of millenarianism from ancient times to the 17th century, each theorist investigates the modern and postmodern debates in which apocalyptic...

Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953) was a formidable figure in early-twentieth-century philosophy of science. Educated in Germany, he was influential in establishing the so-called Berlin Circle, a companion group to the Vienna Circle founded by his colleague...

In Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, Edouard Machery argues that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our epistemic reach and that philosophy should re-orient itself toward more humble, but ultimately more...

In Technology and Anarchy: A Reading of Our Era, Simona Chiodo argues that the technological era can be read as the most radical form of anarchism ever experienced. People are not only removing the role of the expert as a mediator, but also trying, for...

This volume includes a reworking of the landmark essay "Introduction to the Study of Practical Wisdom," and new material drawn from notes and schemata.About the AuthorKenneth T. Gallagher was Philosophy Professor Emeritus at Fordham University.Book...

The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant asks how the literary works of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist might be considered a critique and elaboration of Kantian philosophy. In 1801, the twenty-three-year-old Kleist, attributing his loss of...

Our reasoning evolved not for finding the truth, but for social bonding and convincing. The best logical methods humans have created provide no path to truth, unless something is assumed as true from the start. Other than that, we only have methods for...

The four main essays in this volume investigate new sectors of the theory of decision, preference, act-characteristics, and action analysis. Herbert A. Simon applies tools developed in the theory of decision-making to the logic of action, and thereby...

In this work, Piaget's theory of the development and nature of knowledge is discussed in the context of 20th-century European thought, and his views are compared with those of Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Foucault, and writers of the Frankfurt school. The...

Presents its reader with a thorough explanation and evaluation of H.G. Gadamer's concept of 'effective history', not only as it pertains to the broader range of hermeneutic and postmodern thinkers working in the wake of Kantian philosophy, but first and...

A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox is the culmination of a decades-long engagement with Moore's paradox by the world's leading authority on the subject, the late John Williams. The book offers a comprehensive account of Moore's paradox in thought and...

Global inequalities and our social identities shape who we are, who we can be online, and what we know. From social media to search engines to Wikipedia, the internet is thoroughly embedded in how we produce, find, and share knowledge around the world...

Did Freud present a scientific hypothesis about the unconscious, as he always maintained and as many of his disciples keep repeating? This question has long prompted debates concerning the legitimacy and usefulness of psychoanalysis, and it is of utmost...