Epistemology

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide and is central to European policies of outsourcing migration management. Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first book to critically and comprehensively explore...

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge,...

This book is devoted to the theory of legal theory, also referred to as the "meta-theory of law".The aim of this emerging discipline is to determine the objectives, aims and methods of legal theory, and to establish the conditions of possibility as well...

In this bold work, of broad scope and rich erudition, Richard Miller sets out to reorient the philosophy of science. By questioning both positivism and its leading critics, he develops new solutions to the most urgent problems about justification,...

Philosophical Skepticism provides a selection of texts drawn from the skeptical tradition of Western philosophy as well as texts written by opponents of skepticism. Taken together with the historical introduction by Landesman and Meeks, these texts...

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...

What can epistemology tell us about love? Here two philosophers use their training in arguments and reasoning to uncover the role of ungrounded beliefs when we fall in love. This not a self-help book, it is a philosophy book. Free of advice, methods...

This book considers cultural psychology from historical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, building an understanding of cultural psychology as a human science and moving beyond the nature-culture dichotomy. The unique collection of chapters...

How might we change ourselves without ending our existence? What could we become, if we had access to an advanced form of bioengineering that allowed us dramatically to alter our genome? Could we remain in existence after ceasing to be alive? What is it...

Most contemporary metaphysicians are sceptical about the reality of familiar objects such as dogs and trees, people and desks, cells and stars. They prefer an ontology of the spatially tiny or temporally tiny. Tiny microparticles 'dog-wise arranged'...

Immunity to error through misidentification is recognised as an important feature of certain kinds of first-person judgments, as well as arguably being a feature of other indexical or demonstrative judgments. In this collection of newly commissioned...

John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding begins with a clear statement of an epistemological goal: to explain the limits of human knowledge, opinion, and ignorance. The actual text of the Essay, in stark contrast, takes a long and seemingly...

The Architectonics of Meaning is a lucid demonstration of the purposes, methods, and implications of philosophical semantics that both supports and builds on Richard McKeon's and other noted pluralists' convictions that multiple philosophical approaches...

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...

In 1977, Shoshana Felman opened up the question of how literature and psychoanalysis speak to each other's most intimate concerns with her landmark volume of Yale French Studies entitled Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading...

When you believe something for a good reason, your belief is in a position to be justified, rational, responsible, or to count as knowledge. But what is the nature of this thing that can make such a difference? Traditionally, epistemologists thought of...

Information and Mind explores questions of consciousness that Fred Dretske addressed in his philosophical career. Ranging from one of the earliest problems Dretske analyzed-the nature of seeing an object-to epistemological issues that he began working on...

We talk and think about our beliefs both in a categorical (yes/no) and in a graded way. How do the two kinds of belief hang together? The most straightforward answer is that we believe something categorically if we believe it to a high enough degree. But...

Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper are believed by many who study science to be the two key thinkers of the twentieth century. Each addressed the question of how scientific theories change, but they came to different conclusions. By turning our attention to...

Helps you understand the central debates in the three main branches of Continental philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics: What is real? How can we know what is real? How might we live authentically? These are the three fundamental questions...

The thirteen essays in this volume explore for the first time the possible skeptical implications of disagreement in different areas and from different perspectives, with an emphasis in the current debate about the epistemic significance of disagreement...

What happens when we have second thoughts about the epistemic standing of our beliefs, when we stop to check on beliefs which we have already formed or hypotheses which we have under consideration? In the essays collected in this volume, Hilary Kornblith...

What does it mean to understand something? What is the essence of understanding, when compared across multiple domains? Varieties of Understanding offers new and original work on the nature of understanding, raising questions about what understanding...

With a new reading of Thomas Reid on primary and secondary qualities, Christopher A. Shrock illuminates the Common Sense theory of perception. Shrock follow's Reid's lead in defending common sense philosophy against the problem of secondary qualities,...

The internalism-externalism debate is one of the oldest debates in epistemology. Internalists assert that the justification of our beliefs can only depend on facts internal to us, while externalists insist that justification can depend on additional, for...

Imagine you are sitting at Starbuck glancing at the blue coffee mug in front of you. The mug is blue on the outside, white on the inside. It's large for a mug. And it's nearly full of freshly made coffee. In the envisaged case, you see all those aspects...

Helps you understand the central debates in the three main branches of Continental philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics: What is real? How can we know what is real? How might we live authentically? These are the three fundamental questions...

An ambitious new model of experimentation that will reorient our understanding of the key features of experimental practice. What is experimental knowledge, and how do we get it? While there is general agreement that experiment is a crucial source of...

Post-Gettier epistemology is increasingly modalized epistemology - proposing and debating modally explicable conditionals with suitably epistemic content (an approach initially inspired by Robert Nozick's 1981 account of knowledge), as needing to be...

This volume brings together recent work by leading and up-and-coming philosophers on the topic of virtue epistemology. The prospects of virtue-theoretic analyses of knowledge depend crucially on our ability to give some independent account of what...

Are there any universal entities? Or is the world populated only by particular things? The problem of universals is one of the most fascinating and enduring topics in the history of metaphysics, with roots in ancient and medieval philosophy. This...

Ever since Plato it has been thought that one knows only if one's belief hits the mark of truth and does so with adequate justification. The issues debated by Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa concern mostly the nature and conditions of such epistemic...

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...

This book is about knowledge and its value. At its heart is a straightforward idea: we can answer many interesting and difficult questions in epistemology by reflecting on the role of epistemic evaluation in human life. Michael Hannon calls this approach...

In Attributing Knowledge, Jody Azzouni challenges philosophical conventions about what it means to know something. He argues that the restrictive conditions philosophers place on knowers only hold in special cases; knowledge can be attributed to babies,...

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...

Reading and textual interpretation are ordinary human activities, performed inside as well as outside academia, but precisely how they function as unique sources of knowledge is not well understood. In this book, Rene van Woudenberg explores the nature...

This anthology brings together ten papers which have defined and advanced the debate between internalism and externalism in epistemology.About the AuthorHilary Kornblith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. He is the author of...

German Idealism as Constructivism is the culmination of many years of research by distinguished philosopher Tom Rockmore-it is his definitive statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of...

Contrastivism can be applied to a variety of problems within philosophy, and as such, it can be coherently seen as a unified movement. This volume brings together state-of-the-art research on the contrastive treatment of philosophical concepts and...