Epistemology

Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Social, cultural, and technological...

One of the most important issues in public and academic debate is the concept of value and the difficulty in defining it. In this new book, the leading social theorist Hans Joas explores the nature of values in relation to some of the leading figures of...

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the...

Ignorance is a neglected issue in philosophy. This is surprising for, contrary to what one might expect, it is not clear what ignorance is. Some philosophers say or assume that it is a lack of knowledge, whereas others claim or presuppose that it is an...

Substance has long been one of the key categories in metaphysics. This Element focuses on contemporary work on substance, and in particular on contemporary substance ontologies, metaphysical systems in which substance is one of the fundamental categories...

Richard Pettigrew offers an extended investigation into a particular way of justifying the rational principles that govern our credences (or degrees of belief). The main principles that he justifies are the central tenets of Bayesian epistemology, though...

This volume is devoted to Lewis's work in metaphysics and epistemology. Topics covered include properties, ontology, possibility, truthmaking, probability, the mind-body problem, vision, belief, and knowledge. The purpose of this collection, and the...

Robert Stalnaker explores the notion of the context in which speech takes place, its role in the interpretation of what is said, and in the explanation of the dynamics of discourse. He distinguishes different notions of context, but the main focus is on...

Responding to growing interest in the Kantian tradition and in issues concerning space and time, this volume offers an insightful and original contribution to the literature by bringing together analytical and phenomenological approaches in a productive...

Preeminent American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859-1952) rejected Hegelian idealism for the pragmatism of William James. In this collection of informal, highly readable essays, originally published between 1897 and 1909, Dewey articulates...

Bill Brewer presents, motivates, and defends a bold new solution to a fundamental problem in the philosophy of perception. What is the correct theoretical conception of perceptual experience, and how should we best understand the most fundamental nature...

Identity criteria are powerful tools for the metaphysician. They tell us when items are identical or distinct. Some varieties of identity criteria also try to explain in virtue of what items are identical or distinct. This Element has two objectives: to...

Philosophers have long agreed that moral responsibility might not only have a freedom condition, but also an epistemic condition. Moral responsibility and knowledge interact, but the question is exactly how. Ignorance might constitute an excuse, but the...

The Book of Causes, highly influential in the medieval university, was commonly but incorrectly understood to be the completion of Aristotle's metaphysics. It was Thomas Aquinas who first judged it to have been abstracted from Proclus's Elements of...

How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge...

Scott Sturgeon presents an original account of mental states and their dynamics. He develops a detailed story of coarse- and fine-grained mental states, a novel perspective on how they fit together, an engaging theory of the rational transitions between...

Some of our attitudes are fitting, others unfitting. It seems fitting to admire Mandela, but not Idi Amin, and to believe that the Seine flows through Paris, but not that the Thames does. Fitting attitudes get things right. Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way...

"A complete and unified account of Plato's epistemology . . . scholarly, historically sensitive, and philosophically sophisticated. Above all it is sensible. . . . White's strength is that he places Plato's preoccupation in careful historical...

Hilary Putnam has been at the center of contemporary debates about the nature of the mind and of its access to the world, about language and its relation to reality, and many other metaphysical and epistemological issues. In this book he turns to...

Repeatedly and successfully, the celebrated Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick has reached out to a broad audience beyond the confines of his discipline, addressing ethical and social problems that matter to every thoughtful person. Here Nozick continues...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789076660325Author Pierre MarcelFormat PaperbackPage Count 340Imprint Wordbridge PubPublisher Wordbridge PubWeight(grams) 499gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm *...

Bertrand Russell changed Western philosophy forever. He tackled many puzzles--how our minds work, how we experience the world, and what the true nature of meaning is. In "Introducing Bertrand Russell "we meet a passionate eccentric, active in world...

The Rules of Thought develops a rationalist theory of mental content while defending a traditional epistemology of philosophy. Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and Benjamin W. Jarvis contend that a capacity for pure rational thought is fundamental to mental...

Epistemology is currently in ferment. Ever since Plato, the textbook story goes, knowledge has been conceived as justified true belief; but in 1963 Edmund Gettier blew a huge hole in this supposedly traditional account. Six decades later, however,...

Western civilization is over. So begins Jan Zwicky's trenchant exploration of the root of global cultural and ecological collapse: a way of thinking that is also linked to some of the West's most noted achievements.The Renaissance merged imperial...

In "Moses the Egyptian"-the centerpiece of Rigorism of Truth, the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg addresses two defining figures in the intellectual history of the twentieth century: Sigmund Freud and Hannah Arendt. Unpublished during his lifetime,...

When philosophers try to understand the nature of knowledge, they have to confront the Gettier problem. This problem, set out in Edmund Gettier's famous paper of 1963, has yet to be solved, and has challenged our best attempts to define what knowledge is...

Aristotle is famous for thinking that all our knowledge comes from perception. But it's not immediately clear what this view is meant to entail. It's not clear, for instance, what perception is supposed to contribute to the more advanced forms of...

It's standard in epistemology to approach questions about knowledge and rational belief using idealized, simplified models. But while the practice of constructing idealized models in epistemology is old, metaepistemological reflection on that practice is...

Trust is central to our social lives. We know by trusting what others tell us. We act on that basis, and on the basis of trust in their promises and implicit commitments. So trust underpins both epistemic and practical cooperation and is key to...

Social epistemology has been flourishing in recent years, expanding and making connections with political philosophy, virtue epistemology, philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy. The philosophy of the social world too is flourishing, with...

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had...

When graduate students start their studies, they usually have sound knowledge of some areas of philosophy, but the overall map of their knowledge is often patchy and disjointed. There are a number of topics that any contemporary philosopher working in...

In this wide-ranging meditation on the nature and purpose of hermeneutics, Gerald L. Bruns argues that hermeneutics is not merely a contemporary theory but an extended family of questions about understanding and interpretation that have multiple and...

Map making and, ultimately, map thinking is ubiquitous across literature, cosmology, mathematics, psychology, and genetics. We partition, summarize, organize, and clarify our world via spatialized representations. Our maps and, more generally, our...

In this important new work, Haack develops an original theory of empirical evidence or justification, and argues its appropriateness to the goals of inquiry. In so doing, Haack provides detailed critical case studies of Lewis's foundationalism;...

Shared Musical Lives makes the case for the epistemological and ethical significance of musical experience. Music can be a source of self-knowledge and self-expression, and hence reveal important dimensions of the self to others. This knowledge-of both...

James F. Ross is a creative and independent thinker in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In this concise metaphysical essay, he argues clearly and analytically that meaning, truth, impossibility, natural necessity, and our intelligent...

First Published in 1972, Introduction to Systems Philosophy presents Ervin Laszlo's first comprehensive volume on the subject. It argues for a systematic and constructive inquiry into natural phenomenon on the assumption of general order in nature...

We live in a society that promotes the universal process of producing knowledge and truth as a fundamental social process. Such promotion of universality seems to subjugate others forms of knowing, rendering them invisible, unintelligible, and ineligible...