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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Epistemology, theory of knowledge
The story of Sosipatra of Pergamum (4th century C.E.) as told by her biographer, Eunapius of Sardis in his Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, is a remarkable tale. It is the story of an elite young girl from the area of Ephesus, who was educated by traveling oracles (daemons), and who grew up to lead her own philosophy school on the west coast of Asia Minor. She was also a prophet of sorts, channeling divine messages to her students, family, and friends, and foretelling the future. Sosipatra of Pergamum is the first sustained, book length attempt to tell the story of this mysterious woman. It presents a rich contextualization of the brief and highly fictionalized portrait provided by Eunapius. In doing so, the book explores the cultural and political landscape of late ancient Asia Minor, especially the areas around Ephesus, Pergamum, Sardis, and Smyrna. It also discusses moments in Sosipatra's life for what they reveal more generally about women's lives in Late Antiquity in the areas of childhood, education, family, household, motherhood, widowhood, and professional life. Her career sheds light on late Roman Platonism, its engagement with religion, ritual, and "magic," and the role of women in this movement. By thoroughly examining the ancient evidence, Heidi Marx recovers a hidden yet important figure from the rich intellectual traditions of the Roman Near East.
No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history, understood as a series of changing expectations about the cognitive ideal that beings such as us might hope to achieve in a world such as this. The story begins with Aristotle and then looks at how his epistemic program was developed through later antiquity and into the Middle Ages, before being dramatically reformulated in the seventeenth century. In watching these debates unfold over the centuries, one sees why epistemology has traditionally been embedded within a much larger sphere of concerns about human nature and the reality of the world we live in. It ultimately becomes clear why epistemology today has become a much narrower and specialized field, concerned with the conditions under which it is true to say, that someone knows something. Based on a series of lectures given at Oxford University, Robert Pasnau's book ranges widely over the history of philosophy, and examines in some detail the rise of science as an autonomous discipline. Ultimately Pasnau argues that we may have no good reasons to suppose ourselves capable of achieving even the most minimal standards for knowledge, and the final chapter concludes with a discussion of faith and hope.
This volume brings together essays - three of them previously unpublished - on the epistemology, ethics, and politics of memory by the late feminist philosopher Sue Campbell. The essays in Part I diagnose contemporary skepticism about personal memory, and develop an account of good remembering that is better suited to contemporary (reconstructive) theories of memory. Campbell argues that being faithful to the past requires both accuracy and integrity, and is both an epistemic and an ethical achievement. The essays in Part II focus on the activities and practices through which we explore and negotiate the shared significance of our different recollections of the past, and the importance of sharing memory for constituting our identities. Views about self, identity, relation, and responsibility (all influenced by traditions in feminist philosophy) are examined through the lens of Campbell's relational conception of memory. She argues that remaining faithful to our past sometimes requires us to re-negotiate the boundaries between ourselves and the collectives to which we belong. In Part III, Campbell uses her relational theory of memory to address the challenges of sharing memory and renewing selves in contexts that are fractured by moral and political difference, especially those arising from a history of injustice and oppression. She engages in detail Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where survivor memories have the potential to illuminate the significance of the past for a shared future. The study of memory brings together philosophers, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, legal theorists, and political theorists and activists. Sue Campbell demonstrates a singular ability to put these many different areas of scholarship and activism into fruitful conversation with each other while also adding an original and powerful voice to the discussion.
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 representing epistemology-which is centrally concerned with belief-as integrated with a plausible philosophy of mind that does justice both to the nature of belief and to the conditions for its formation and regulation. Part One centers on belief and its relation to the will. It explores our control of our beliefs, and it describes several forms belief may take and shows how beliefs are connected with the world outside the mind. Part Two concerns normative aspects of epistemology, explores the nature of intellectual virtue, and presents a theory of moral perception. The book also offers a theory of the grounds of both justification and knowledge and shows how these grounds bear on the self-evident. Rationality is distinguished from justification; each clarified in relation to the other; and the epistemological importance of the phenomenal-for instance, of intuitional experience and other "private " aspects of mental life-is explored. The final section addresses social epistemology. It offers a theory of testimony as essential in human knowledge and a related account of the rational resolution of disagreements.
Investigation of the Percept is a short (eight verses and a three page autocommentary) work that focuses on issues of perception and epistemology. Its author, Dignaga, was one of the most influential figures in the Indian Buddhist epistemological tradition, and his ideas had a profound and wide-ranging impact in India, Tibet, and China. The work inspired more than twenty commentaries throughout East Asia and three in Tibet, the most recent in 2014. This book is the first of its kind in Buddhist studies: a comprehensive history of a text and its commentarial tradition. The volume editors translate the root text and commentary, along with Indian and Tibetan commentaries, providing detailed analyses of the commentarial innovations of each author, as well as critically edited versions of all texts and extant Sanskrit fragments of passages. The team-based approach made it possible to study and translate a corpus of treatises in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese and to employ the methods of critical philology and cross-cultural philosophy to provide readers with a rich collection of studies and translations, along with detailed philosophical analyses that open up the intriguing implications of Dignaga's thought and demonstrate the diversity of commentarial approaches to his text. This rich text has inspired some of the greatest minds in India and Tibet. It explores some of the key issues of Buddhist epistemology: the relationship between minds and their percepts, the problems of idealism and realism, and error and misperception.
We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical, context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.
Why should inquiry be possible, only if some knowledge is required
to guide it, as conventionally understood? Contrary to the
conventional wisdom held by many thinkers in all human history
hitherto existing, there are some fundamental dialectic principles
hidden behind any categories of understanding in knowing. And these
principles impose some constraints, at both methodological and
ontological levels, together with other levels in culture, society,
nature, and the mind - on how reality is to be understood.
Furthermore, the specific categories of understanding (as
conventionally understood), even if valid at all (which are often
not the case), are often not that important, when compared with
these more fundamental dialectic principles hidden behind them. The
focus on understanding the nature of knowledge has been much
misplaced, in this sense, in the intellectual history hitherto
existing, and much time and talent have been wasted for something
less important. If true, this thesis will alter the way of how
knowledge is to be understood across the board.
Katja Maria Vogt's Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato explores a Socratic intuition about the difference between belief and knowledge. Beliefs - doxai - are deficient cognitive attitudes. In believing something, one accepts some content as true without knowing that it is true; one holds something to be true that could turn out to be false. Since our actions reflect what we hold to be true, holding beliefs is potentially harmful for oneself and others. Accordingly, beliefs are ethically worrisome and even, in the words of Plato's Socrates, "shameful." As Vogt argues, this is a serious philosophical proposal and it speaks to intuitions we are likely to share. But it involves a notion of belief that is rather different from contemporary notions. Today, it is a widespread assumption that true beliefs are better than false beliefs, and that some true beliefs (perhaps those that come with justifications) qualify as knowledge. Socratic epistemology offers a genuinely different picture. In aiming for knowledge, one must aim to get rid of beliefs. Knowledge does not entail belief - belief and knowledge differ in such important ways that they cannot both count as kinds of belief. As long as one does not have knowledge, one should reserve judgment and investigate by thinking through possible ways of seeing things. According to Vogt, the ancient skeptics and Stoics draw many of these ideas from Plato's dialogues, revising Socratic-Platonic arguments as they see fit. Belief and Truth retraces their steps through interpretations of the Apology, Ion, Republic, Theaetetus, and Philebus, reconstructs Pyrrhonian investigation and thought, and illuminates the connections between ancient skepticism and relativism, as well as the Stoic view that beliefs do not even merit the evaluations "true" and "false."
Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig examine the foundations and applications of Davidson's influential program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages. The program uses an axiomatic truth theory for a language, which meets certain constraints, to serve the goals of a compositional meaning theory. Lepore and Ludwig explain and clarify the motivations for the approach, and then consider how to apply the framework to a range of important natural language constructions, including quantifiers, proper names, indexicals, simple and complex demonstratives, quotation, adjectives and adverbs, the simple and perfect tenses, temporal adverbials and temporal quantifiers, tense in sentential complement clauses, attitude and indirect discourse reports, and the problem of interrogative and imperative sentences. They not only discuss Davidson's own contributions to these subjects but consider criticisms, developments, and alternatives as well. They conclude with a discussion of logical form in natural language in light of the approach, the role of the concept of truth in the program, and Davidson's view of it. Anyone working on meaning will find this book invaluable.
Indian thought is well known for diverse philosophical and contemplative excursions into the nature of selfhood. Led by Buddhists and the yoga traditions of Hinduism and Jainism, Indian thinkers have engaged in a rigorous analysis and reconceptualization of our common notion of self. Less understood is the way in which such theories of self intersect with issues involving agency and free will; yet such intersections are profoundly important, as all major schools of Indian thought recognize that moral goodness and religious fulfillment depend on the proper understanding of personal agency. Moreover, their individual conceptions of agency and freedom are typically nodes by which an entire school's epistemological, ethical, and metaphysical perspectives come together as a systematic whole. Free Will, Agency, and Selfhood in Indian Philosophy explores the contours of this issue, from the perspectives of the major schools of Indian thought. With new essays by leading specialists in each field, this volume provides rigorous analysis of the network of issues surrounding agency and freedom as developed within Indian thought.
A unifying theme of Loeb's work is epistemological - that Descartes
and Hume advance theories of knowledge that rely on a substantial
'naturalistic' component, adopting one or another member of a
cluster of psychological properties of beliefs as the goal of
inquiry and the standard for assessing belief-forming mechanisms.
Thus Loeb shows a surprising affinity between the epistemologies of
the two figures -- surprising because they are often thought of as
polar opposites in this respect.
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception is a survey by leading philosophical thinkers of contemporary issues and new thinking in philosophy of perception. It includes sections on the history of the subject, introductions to contemporary issues in the epistemology, ontology and aesthetics of perception, treatments of the individual sense modalities and of the things we perceive by means of them, and a consideration of how perceptual information is integrated and consolidated. New analytic tools and applications to other areas of philosophy are discussed in depth. Each of the forty-five entries is written by a leading expert, some collaborating with younger figures; each seeks to introduce the reader to a broad range of issues. All contain new ideas on the topics covered; together they demonstrate the vigour and innovative zeal of a young field. The book is accessible to anybody who has an intellectual interest in issues concerning perception.
You believe that there is a book (or a computer screen) in front of
you because it seems visually that way. I believe that I ate cereal
for breakfast because I seem to remember eating it for breakfast.
And we believe that torturing for fun is morally wrong and that
2+2=4 because those claims seem intuitively obvious. In each of
these cases, it is natural to think that our beliefs are not only
based on a seeming, but also that they are justifiably based on
these seemings-at least assuming there is no relevant
counterevidence.
Perception is our main source of epistemic access to the outside
world. Perception and Basic Beliefs addresses two central questions
in epistemology: which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e.,
noninferentially justified) and where does perception end and
inferential cognition begin. Jack Lyons offers a highly externalist
theory, arguing that what makes a belief a basic belief or a
perceptual belief is determined by the nature of the cognitive
system, or module, that produced the beliefs. On this view, the
sensory experiences that typically accompany perceptual beliefs
play no indispensable role in the justification of these beliefs,
and one can have perceptual beliefs--justified perceptual
beliefs--even in the absence of any sensory experiences whatsoever.
Lyons develops a general theory of basic beliefs and argues that
perceptual beliefs are a species of basic beliefs. This results
from the fact that perceptual modules are a special type of basic
belief-producing modules. Importantly, some beliefs are not the
outputs of this class of cognitive module; these beliefs are
therefore non-basic, thus requiring inferential support from other
beliefs for their justification. This last point is used to defend
a reliabilist epistemology against an important class of
traditional objections (where the agent uses a reliable process
that she doesn't know to be reliable).
What if anything justifies us in believing the testimony of others? How should we react to disagreement between ourselves and our peers, and to disagreement among the experts when we ourselves are novices? Can beliefs be held by groups of people in addition to the people composing those groups? And if so, how should groups go about forming their beliefs? How should we design social systems, such as legal juries and scientific research-sharing schemes, to promote knowledge among the people who engage in them? When different groups of people judge different beliefs to be justified, how can we tell which groups are correct? These questions are at the heart of the vital discipline of social epistemology. The classic articles in this volume address these questions in ways that are both cutting-edge and easy to understand. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in epistemology.
Coleridge's status as a philosopher has often been questioned. `I am a poor poet in England,' he admitted, `but in America, I am a great philosopher.' J. S. Mill's assertion that `the time is yet far distant when, in the estimation of Coleridge, and of his influence upon the intellect of our time, anything like unanimity can be looked for' seems to have been justified. Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a `logosophic' system which attempted `to reduce all knowledges into harmony'. She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which his unifying principle is revealed. She explores the various meanings for the term `Logos', a recurrent theme in every area of Coleridge's thought - philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting, his perceptions more acute, as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves.
Adrian Bardon's A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a short yet thorough introduction to the history, philosophy, and science of the study of time-from the pre-Socratic philosophers through Einstein and beyond. Its treatment is roughly chronological, starting with the ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides and proceeding through the history of Western philosophy and science up to the present. Using illustrations and keeping technical language to a minimum, A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time covers subjects such as time and change, the experience of time, physical and metaphysical approaches to the nature of time, the direction of time, time-travel, time and freedom of the will, and scientific and philosophical approaches to eternity and the beginning of time. Bardon brings the resources of over 2500 years of philosophy and science to bear on some of humanity's most fundamental and enduring questions.
We typically think we have free will. But how could we have free will, if for anything we do, it was already true in the distant past that we would do that thing? Or how could we have free will, if God already knows in advance all the details of our lives? Such issues raise the specter of "fatalism". This book collects sixteen previously published articles on fatalism, truths about the future, and the relationship between divine foreknowledge and human freedom, and includes a substantial introductory essay and bibliography. Many of the pieces collected here build bridges between discussions of human freedom and recent developments in other areas of metaphysics, such as philosophy of time. Ideal for courses in free will, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion, Freedom, Fatalism, and Foreknowledge will encourage important new directions in thinking about free will, time, and truth.
The biological and social sciences often generalize causal
conclusions from one context or location to others that may differ
in some relevant respects, as is illustrated by inferences from
animal models to humans or from a pilot study to a broader
population. Inferences like these are known as extrapolations. The
question of how and when extrapolation can be legitimate is a
fundamental issue for the biological and social sciences that has
not received the attention it deserves. In Across the Boundaries,
Steel argues that previous accounts of extrapolation are inadequate
and proposes a better approach that is able to answer
methodological critiques of extrapolation from animal models to
humans.
In this short monograph, John Horty explores the difficulties
presented for Gottlob Frege's semantic theory, as well as its
modern descendents, by the treatment of defined expressions.
Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of
everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be
answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to
understand human cognition and agency. What is the connection
between knowing how and knowing that? Is knowledge how simply a
type of ability or disposition to act? Is there an irreducibly
practical form of knowledge? What is the role of the intellect in
intelligent action? This volume contains fifteen state of the art
essays by leading figures in philosophy and linguistics that
amplify and sharpen the debate between "intellectualists" and
"anti-intellectualists" about mind and action, highlighting the
conceptual, empirical, and linguistic issues that motivate and
sustain the conflict. The essays also explore various ways in which
this debate informs central areas of ethics, philosophy of action,
epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and
cognitive science.
Much of what we know is acquired by taking things on the word of
other people whom we trust and treat as authorities concerning what
to believe. But what exactly is it to take someone's word for
something? What is it to treat another as an authority concerning
what to believe, and what is it to then trust this person for the
truth? In Testimony, Trust, and Authority, Benjamin McMyler argues
that philosophers have failed to appreciate the nature and
significance of our epistemic dependence on the word of others.
What others tell us is the case-their testimony, as philosophers
use the term-provides us with a reason for belief that is
fundamentally unlike the kind of reason for belief provided by
other kinds of impersonal evidence. Unlike a footprint in the snow
or a bloody knife left at the scene of a crime, a speaker's
testimony provides an audience with what McMyler calls a
second-personal reason for belief, a reason for belief that serves
to parcel out epistemic responsibility for the belief
interpersonally between speaker and audience.
This book is not aimed at exhuming Kant, but resurrecting him. It is inspired by the Critique of Pure Reason , yet is not about it: perhaps over-ambitiously, it tries to delineate not Kant's metaphysics of experience but the truth of the matter. The author shows rather than says where he agrees and disagrees with the first Critique , in so far as he understood that profound but obscure, over-systematic yet carelessly written, inspiring and infuriating, magnificent but flawed masterpiece. The book attempts a highly systematic presentation, in which the very form of the work reflects the content of the arguments. Kant is often derided for the extent to which he allows his penchant for architectonic structure to distort his insights, but it is argued that he had the right instinct in assuming that there must be some systematic way in which the necessary conditions for experience fit together. The contemporary trend in analytical philosophy seems to be towards ever more specialized, jargon-infested work, and there is a need to draw things together into a wider view that can be more generally appreciated.
What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision.
For centuries, philosophers have been puzzled by the fact that people often respect moral obligations as a matter of principle, setting aside considerations of self-interest. In more recent years, social scientists have been puzzled by the more general phenomenon of rule-following, the fact that people often abide by social norms even when doing so produces undesirable consequences. Experimental game theorists have demonstrated conclusively that the old-fashioned picture of "economic man," constantly reoptimizing in order to maximize utility in all circumstances, cannot provide adequate foundations for a general theory of rational action. The dominant response, however, has been a slide toward irrationalism. If people are ignoring the consequences of their actions, it is claimed, it must be because they are making some sort of a mistake. In Following the Rules, Joseph Heath attempts to reverse this trend, by showing how rule-following can be understood as an essential element of rational action. The first step involves showing how rational choice theory can be modified to incorporate deontic constraint as a feature of rational deliberation. The second involves disarming the suspicion that there is something mysterious or irrational about the psychological states underlying rule-following. According to Heath, human rationality is a by-product of the so-called "language upgrade" that we receive as a consequence of the development of specific social practices. As a result, certain constitutive features of our social environment-such as the rule-governed structure of social life-migrate inwards, and become constitutive features of our psychological faculties. This in turn explains why there is an indissoluble bond between practical rationality and deontic constraint. In the end, what Heath offers is a naturalistic, evolutionary argument in favor of the traditional Kantian view that there is an internal connection between being a rational agent and feeling the force of one's moral obligations. |
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