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The questions of metaphysics are among the deepest and most puzzling. What is time? Am I free in my actions? What makes me the same person I was as a child? Why is there something rather than nothing? Riddles of Existence makes metaphysics genuinely accessible, even fun. Its lively, informal style brings the riddles to life and shows how stimulating they can be to think about. No philosophical background is required to enjoy this book: anyone wanting to think about life's most profound questions will find Riddles of Existence provocative and entertaining.
Riddles of Existence makes metaphysics genuinely accessible, even fun. Its lively, informal style brings the riddles to life and shows how stimulating they can be to think about. No philosophical background is required to enjoy this book. It is ideal for beginning students. Anyone wanting to think about life's most profound questions will find Riddles of Existence provocative and entertaining. This updated edition features two new chapters, on the metaphysics of ethics and metametaphysics. Book jacket.
Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition. Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This is the traditional view of justification. It is now widely opposed. The essays included in this volume develop and defend the tradition. Evidentialism has many assets. In addition to providing an intuitively plausible account of epistemic justification, it helps to resolve the problem of the criterion, helps to disentangle epistemic and ethical evaluations, and illuminates the relationship between epistemic evaluations of beliefs and th...
What can we know and what should we believe about today's world? What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues applies the concerns and techniques of epistemology to a wide variety of contemporary issues. Questions about what we can know-and what we should believe-are first addressed through an explicit consideration of the practicalities of working these issues out at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Coady calls for an 'applied turn' in epistemology, a process he likens to the applied turn that transformed the study of ethics in the early 1970s. Subjects dealt with include: Experts-how can we recognize them? And when should we trust them? Rumors-should they ever be believed? And can they, in fact, be a source of knowledge? Conspiracy theories-when, if ever, should they be believed, and can they be known to be true? The blogosphere-how does it compare with traditional media as a source of knowledge and justified belief? Timely, thought provoking, and controversial, What to Believe Now offers a wealth of insights into a branch of philosophy of growing importance-and increasing relevance-in the twenty-first century.
"For those new to philosophy, 'Tetralogue' is a marvellous way into the subject. For those who are old hands, it neatly poses serious questions about truth and falsity, relativism and dogma."--Dust jacket flap.
In this new explanationist account of epistemic justification, Poston argues that the explanatory virtues provide all the materials necessary for a plausible account of justified belief. There are no purely autonomous reasons. Rather reasons occur only within an explanatory coherent set of beliefs.
This anthology focuses on three areas in the theory of knowledge: epistemic justification; analyses of knowledge and scepticism; and recent developments in epistemology. Each of the three sections includes a brief introduction to the readings, a series of study questions, and a list of suggested readings. Section 1 deals with coherentism, foundationalism, reliabilism, and includes articles by Chisholm, BonJour, Audi, Goldman, and Fumerton. Section 2 deals with the analysis of knowledge and Gettier problems, and a variety of forms and responses to scepticism; it includes articles by Gettier, Conee, Feldman, Putnam, Nagel, and Stroud. Section 3 introduces the reader to recent developments in naturalized, feminist, and social epistemology, and includes articles by Quine, Almeder, Putnam, Anderson, Harding, Longino, Hardwig, Rorty, and Kitcher.
In the contentious debate among contemporary epistemologists and philosophers regarding justification, there is one consensus: justification is distinct from knowledge; there are justified beliefs that do not amount to knowledge, even if all instances of knowledge are instances of justified belief. In Without Justification, Jonathan Sutton forcefully opposes this claim. He proposes instead that justified belief simply is knowledge—not because there is more knowledge than has been supposed, but because there are fewer justified beliefs. There are, he argues, no false justified beliefs. Sutton suggests that the distinction between justified belief and knowledge is drawn only in contemporary ...
This collection of new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism.
Evidentialism is a popular theory of epistemic justification, yet, as early proponents of the theory Earl Conee and Richard Feldman admit, there are many elements that must be developed before Evidentialism can provide a full account of epistemic justification, or well-founded belief. It is the aim of this book to provide the details that are lacking; here McCain moves past Evidentialism as a mere schema by putting forward and defending a full-fledged theory of epistemic justification. In this book McCain offers novel approaches to several elements of well-founded belief. Key among these are an original account of what it takes to have information as evidence, an account of epistemic support in terms of explanation, and a causal account of the basing relation (the relation that one's belief must bear to her evidence in order to be justified) that is far superior to previous accounts. The result is a fully developed Evidentialist account of well-founded belief.