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Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. In epistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of ci...
In this book the author argues for a groundbreaking perspective that knowledge is inherently interest-relative. This means that what one knows is influenced not just by belief, evidence, and truth, but crucially by the purposes those beliefs serve. Drawing from classical Nyāya epistemologies, the book asserts that knowledge rationalizes action: if you know something, it is sensible to act on it—and the best way to square this with an anti-sceptical epistemology is to say that knowledge is interest-relative. While versions of this view have been debated, they haven’t gained wide acceptance. The author addresses common objections with a refined formulation and explores how this perspectiv...
Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters arethe correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. Inepistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of circ...
Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. In epistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of ci...
In this book the author argues for a groundbreaking perspective that knowledge is inherently interest-relative. This means that what one knows is influenced not just by belief, evidence, and truth, but crucially by the purposes those beliefs serve. Drawing from classical Nyāya epistemologies, the book asserts that knowledge rationalizes action: if you know something, it is sensible to act on it-and the best way to square this with an anti-sceptical epistemology is to say that knowledge is interest-relative. While versions of this view have been debated, they haven't gained wide acceptance. The author addresses common objections with a refined formulation and explores how this perspective el...
There's a lot we don't know, which means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. What these epistemic possibilities are, and how we understand the semantics of epistemic modals, are explored here through a variety of philosophical approaches.
David Lewis's untimely death on 14 October 2001 deprived the philosophical community of one of the outstanding philosophers of the 20th century. As many obituaries remarked, Lewis has an undeniable place in the history of analytical philosophy. His work defines much of the current agenda in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mind and language. This volume, an expanded edition of a special issue of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, covers many of the topics for which Lewis was well known, including possible worlds, counterpart theory, vagueness, knowledge, probability, essence, fiction, laws, conditionals, desire and belief, and truth. Many of the papers are by very established philosophers; others are by younger scholars including many he taught. The volume also includes Lewis's Jack Smart Lecture at the Australian National University, "How Many Lives has Schrödinger's Cat?," published here for the first time. Lewisian Themes will be an invaluable resource for anyone studying Lewis's work, and a major contribution to the many topics that he mastered.
In this book, which thoroughly revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance (1980), David Wiggins retrieves and refurbishes in the light of twentieth-century logic and logical theory certain conceptions of identity, of substance and of persistence through change that philosophy inherits from its past. In this new version, he vindicates the absoluteness, necessity, determinateness and all or nothing character of identity against rival conceptions. He defends a form of essentialism that he calls individuative essentialism, and then a form of realism that he calls conceptualist realism. In a final chapter he advocates a human being-based conception of the identity and individuation of persons, arguing that any satisfactory account of personal memory must make reference to the life of the rememberer himself. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy.
A critique of, and alternative to, the received view of linguistic communication.
This volume offers an original theoretical and methodological approach to the hotly debated issue of epistemic modality. The analysis is conducted in a rigorous typological frame developed after a careful consideration of a wealth of cross-linguistic data, and focuses on Italian, a language often disregarded in comparative analyses. The complexity of the Italian epistemic system provides relevant information that will undoubtedly foster a better understanding of the topic. A new definition of epistemic modality is proposed on a functional basis and the structure of the Italian epistemic system is closely described. The morpho-syntactic characteristics of Italian epistemic forms are regarded as the result of the dialectic between universal functional pressures and peculiar system resistances. Shaped by the system, epistemic modality emerges as an intrinsically linguistic category, which cannot be downsized to a mere conceptual notion, as other approaches would propose.