The philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is very important at every stage of the history of modern American thought. It informs William James's evolutionary metaphysics, John Dewey's theory of logic, W.V.O. Quine's naturalism, and Richard Rorty's notion of the Linguistic Turn. Similarly, many Continental philosophers, like Jurgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Jacques Derrida, and Umberto Eco, have developed Peirce's semiotic logic as central to their own philosophical views. Yet until now there has been a yawning gap in the literature on what is arguably the most essential idea in the entire Peircean corpus, namely his "fallibilism." The basic idea of fallibilism is that all knowledge claims, including those metaphysical, methodological, introspective, and even mathematical claims - all of these remain uncertain, provisional, merely fallible conjectures.

As Elizabeth Cooke explains in "Peirce's Pragmatic Theory of Inquiry," one long-standing concern with the idea of fallibilism is that it might all too easily slide into "skepticism." And this would certainly undermine the overall project of making Peirce's fallibilism the linchpin for any realistic pragmatism. So, it is essential to show Peirce's philosophy does not require any claims to certitude, in order to keep his fallibilism from falling into skepticism or contextualism. Cooke's solution to this problem is to interpret Peirce as having reconceived knowledge - traditionally defined as "foundational" and even "static" - as a dynamic process of inquiry, one which evolves within a larger ontological process of evolution. Her book will be of great interest not only to Peirce and Pragmatism specialists but also to contemporary epistemologists more generally.

Simon Evnine examines various epistemic aspects of what it is to be a person. Persons are defined as finite beings that have beliefs, including second-order beliefs about their own and others' beliefs, and are agents, capable of making long-term plans. It is argued that for any being meeting these conditions, a number of epistemic consequences obtain. First, all such beings must have certain logical concepts and be able to use them in certain ways. Secondly, there are at least two principles governing belief that it is rational for persons to satisfy and are such that nothing can be a person at all unless it satisfies them to a large extent. These principles are that one believe the conjunction of one's beliefs and that one treat one's future beliefs as, by and large, better than one's current beliefs. Thirdly, persons both occupy epistemic points of view on the world and show up within those views. This makes it impossible for them to be completely objective about their own beliefs. Ideals of rationality that require such objectivity, while not necessarily wrong, are intrinsically problematic for persons. This "aspectual dualism" is characteristic of treatments of persons in the Kantian tradition. In sum, these epistemic consequences support a traditional view of the nature of persons, one in opposition to much recent theorizing.

Pragmatism is the view that our philosophical concepts must be connected to our practices--philosophy must stay connected to first order inquiry, to real examples, to real-life expertise. The classical pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, put forward views of truth, rationality, and morality that they took to be connected to, and good for, our practices of inquiry and deliberation.
When Richard Rorty, the best-known contemporary pragmatist, looks at our practices, he finds that we don't aim at truth or objectivity, but only at solidarity, or agreement within a community, or what our peers will let us get away with saying. There is, however, a revisionist movement amongst contemporary philosophers who are interested in pragmatism. When these new pragmatists examine our practices, they find that the trail of the human serpent is over everything, as James said, but this does not toss us into the sea of post-modern arbitrariness, where truth varies from person to person and culture to culture. The fact that our standards of objectivity come into being and evolve over time does not detract from their objectivity. As Peirce and Dewey stressed, we are always immersed in a context of inquiry, where the decision to be made is a decision about what to believe from here, not what to believe were we able to start from scratch--from certain infallible foundations. But we do not go forward arbitrarily.
That is, these new pragmatists provide accounts of inquiry that are both recognizably pragmatic in orientation and hospitable to the cognitive aspiration to get one's subject matter right. The best of Peirce, James, and Dewey has thus resurfaced in deep, interesting, and fruitful ways, explored in this volume by David Bakhurst, Arthur Fine, Ian Hacking, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Cheryl Misak, Terry Pinkard, Huw Price, and Jeffrey Stout.

The volume develops the concepts of the self and its reflexive nature as they are linked to modern thought from Hegel to Luhmann. The moderns are reflexive in a double sense: they create themselves by self-reflexivity and make their world - society - in their own image. That the social world is reflexive means that it is made up of non-subjective (or supra-subjective) communication. The volume's contributors analyze this double reflexivity, of the self and society, from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing both on individual and social narratives. This broad, interdisciplinary approach is a distinctive mark of the entire project. The volume will be structured around the following axes: Self-making and reflexivity - theoretical topics; Social self and the modern world; Literature - self and narrativity; Creative Self - text and fine art. Among the contributors are some of the most renowned specialists in their respective fields, including J. F. Kervegan, B. Zabel, P. Stekeler-Weithofer, I. James, L. Kvasz, H. Ikaheimo and others.

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was one of the most prolific and influential French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. In his enormous corpus of work he engaged with literature, history, historiography, politics, theology and ethics, while debating 'truth' and ethical solutions to life in the face of widespread and growing suspicion about whether such a search is either possible or worthwhile.In Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, Alison Scott-Baumann takes a thematic approach that explores Ricoeur's lifelong struggle to be both iconoclastic and yet hopeful, and avoid the slippery slope to relativism. Through an examination of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion', the book reveals strong continuities throughout his work, as well as significant discontinuities, such as the marked way in which he later distanced himself from the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' and his development of new devices in its place, while seeking a hermeneutics of recovery. Scott-Baumann offers a highly original analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion that will be useful to the fields of philosophy, literature, theology and postmodern social theory.

Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? How do we at all come to understand others? Does empathy amount to and allow for a distinct experiential acquaintance with others, and if so, what does that tell us about the nature of selfhood and social cognition? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter? Engaging with debates and findings in classical phenomenology, in philosophy of mind and in various empirical disciplines, Dan Zahavi's new book Self and Other offers answers to these questions. Discussing such diverse topics as self-consciousness, phenomenal externalism, mindless coping, mirror self-recognition, autism, theory of mind, embodied simulation, joint attention, shame, time-consciousness, embodiment, narrativity, self-disorders, expressivity and Buddhist no-self accounts, Zahavi argues that any theory of consciousness that wishes to take the subjective dimension of our experiential life serious must endorse a minimalist notion of self. At the same time, however, he also contends that an adequate account of the self has to recognize its multifaceted character, and that various complementary accounts must be integrated, if we are to do justice to its complexity. Thus, while arguing that the most fundamental level of selfhood is not socially constructed and not constitutively dependent upon others, Zahavi also acknowledges that there are dimensions of the self and types of self-experience that are other-mediated. The final part of the book exemplifies this claim through a close analysis of shame.

This book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens's poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Marking the first book-length engagement with a philosophical reading of Stevens, it uses Heidegger's theories as a framework through which Stevens's poetry can be read and shows how philosophy and literature can enter into a productive dialogue. It also makes a case for a Heideggerian reading of poetry, exploring his later philosophy with respect to his writing on art, language, and poetry. Taking Stevens's repeated emphasis on the terms "being", "consciousness", "reality" and "truth" as its starting point, the book provides a new reading of Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts. It pursues the link between philosophy, American poetry as reflected through Stevens, and modernist poetics, looking from Stevens's modernist techniques to broader European philosophical movements of the twentieth century.

This book repairs and revives the Theory of Knowledge research program of Russell's Principia era. Chapter 1, 'Introduction and Overview', explains the program's agenda. Inspired by the non-Fregean logicism of Principia Mathematica, it endorses the revolution within mathematics presenting it as a study of relations. The synthetic a priori logic of Principia is the essence of philosophy considered as a science which exposes the dogmatisms about abstract particulars and metaphysical necessities that create prisons that fetter the mind. Incipient in The Problems of Philosophy, the program's acquaintance epistemology embraced a multiple-relation theory of belief. It reached an impasse in 1913, having been itself retrofitted with abstract particular logical forms to address problems of direction and compositionality. With its acquaintance epistemology in limbo, Scientific Method in Philosophy became the sequel to Problems. Chapter 2 explains Russell's feeling intellectually dishonest. Wittgenstein's demand that logic exclude nonsense belief played no role. The 1919 neutral monist era ensued, but Russell found no epistemology for the logic essential to philosophy. Repairing, Chapters 4-6 solve the impasse. Reviving, Chapters 3 and 7 vigorously defend the facts about Principia. Studies of modality and entailment are viable while Principia remains a universal logic above the civil wars of the metaphysicians.

Kathrin Koslicki offers an analysis of ordinary material objects, those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. She focuses particularly on the question of how the parts of such objects are related to the wholes which they compose.
Many philosophers today find themselves in the grip of an exceedingly deflationary conception of what it means to be an object. According to this conception, any plurality of objects, no matter how disparate or gerrymandered, itself composes an object, even if the objects in question fail to exhibit interesting similarities, internal unity, cohesion, or causal interaction amongst each other.
This commitment to initially counterintuitive objects follows from the belief that no principled set of criteria is available by means of which to distinguish intuitively gerrymandered objects from commonsensical ones; the project of this book is to persuade the reader that systematic principles can be found by means of which composition can be restricted, and hence that we need not embrace this deflationary approach to the question of what it means to be an object.
To this end, a more full-blooded neo-Aristotelian account of parthood and composition is developed according to which objects are structured wholes: it is integral to the existence and identity of an object, on this conception, that its parts exhibit a certain manner of arrangement. This structure-based conception of parthood and composition is explored in detail, along with some of its historical precursors as well as some of its contemporary competitors.

Probability theory promises to deliver an exact and unified foundation for inquiry in epistemology and philosophy of science. But philosophy of religion is also fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking. This volume presents original contributions from twelve contemporary researchers, both established and emerging, to offer a representative sample of the work currently being carried out in this potentially rich field of inquiry. Grouped into five parts, the chapters span a broad range of traditional issues in religious epistemology. The first three parts discuss the evidential impact of various considerations that have been brought to bear on the question of the existence of God. These include witness reports of the occurrence of miraculous events, the existence of complex biological adaptations, the apparent 'fine-tuning' for life of various physical constants and the existence of seemingly unnecessary evil. The fourth part addresses a number of issues raised by Pascal's famous pragmatic argument for theistic belief. A final part offers probabilistic perspectives on the rationality of faith and the epistemic significance of religious disagreement.

This is a philosophical book about the idea of human freedom in the context of Chinese philosophy on truth, the good, and beauty. The book shows that there is a coherent and sophisticated philosophical discourse on human freedom throughout the history of Chinese Philosophy in aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology. Feng Qi discusses the development of freedom in light of the Marxist theory of practice. In the history of philosophy, the relation between thought and existence, which is fundamental to philosophy, has stimulated many debates. These debates, though they have assumed diverse forms in Chinese and Western philosophy, have eventually concentrated on three inquiries: the natural world (the objective material world); the human mind; and the concepts, categories, and laws that are representative forms of nature in the human mind and in knowledge. In Chinese philosophy, the three inquiries are summarized using three notions: qi (气 breath, spirit), xin (心 heart), dao (道 the Way). What relationship do the three notions have with each other? This book explores the way to human freedom through the divergent paths in Chinese philosophy. This book’s investigation of human activities brings the typical Chinese philosophical discourse from the cosmological realm into the realm of human beings as individuals. In this regard, the three inquiries can be described as being about real life, ideals, and individuals.

This book is a tribute to the scientific legacy of GianCarlo Ghirardi, who was one of the most influential scientists in the field of modern foundations of quantum theory. In this appraisal, contributions from friends, collaborators and colleagues reflect the influence of his world of thoughts on theory, experiments and philosophy, while also offering prospects for future research in the foundations of quantum physics. The themes of the contributions revolve around the physical reality of the wave function and its notorious collapse, randomness, relativity and experiments.

Several debates of the last years within the research field of contemporary realism - known under titles such as "New Realism," "Continental Realism," or "Speculative Materialism" - have shown that science is not systematically the ultimate measure of truth and reality. This does not mean that we should abandon the notions of truth or objectivity all together, as has been posited repeatedly within certain currents of twentieth century philosophy. However, within the research field of contemporary realism, the concept of objectivity itself has not been adequately refined. What is objective is supposed to be true outside a subject's biases, interpretations and opinions, having truth conditions that are met by the way the world is. The volume combines articles of internationally outstanding authors who have published on either Idealism, Epistemic Relativism, or Realism and often locate themselves within one of these divergent schools of thought. As such, the volume focuses on these traditions with the aim of clarifying what the concept objectivity nowadays stands for within contemporary ontology and epistemology beyond the analytic-continental divide. With articles from: Jocelyn Benoist, Ray Brassier, G. Anthony Bruno, Dominik Finkelde, Markus Gabriel, Deborah Goldgaber, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Johannes Hubner, Andrea Kern, Anton F. Koch, Martin Kusch, Paul M. Livingston, Paul Redding, Sebastian Roedl, Dieter Sturma.

We know a lot about the world and our place in it. We have come to this knowledge in a variety of ways. And one central way that we, both as individuals and as a society, have come to know what we do is through communication with others. Much of what we know, we know on the basis of testimony. In Knowing on Trust, Paul Faulkner presents an epistemological theory of testimony, or a theory that explains how it is that we acquire knowledge and warranted belief from testimony.
The key questions addressed in this book are: what makes it reasonable to accept a piece of testimony? And what warrants belief formed on this testimonial basis? Faulkner argues that existing theories of testimony largely fail because they do not recognise how issues of practical rationality motivate the first question, and this is what makes testimony distinctive as a source of knowledge. At the heart of the theory this book presents is the idea that trust is central to answering these two questions. An attitude of trust can make it reasonable to depend on another's testimony, but what warrants testimonial belief is not trust but the body of evidence the testimony originates from. Testimonial knowledge and testimonially warranted belief are formed on trust. Faulkner goes on to argue that our having a way of life wherein testimony can provide such a source of knowledge and warrant is dependent upon a society in which a certain kind of trust is possible.

Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publicaton which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading philosophers in North America, Europe and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: *traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of scepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc; *new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; *foundational questions in decision-theory; *confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; *topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; *topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; and *work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony and the ethics of belief. Anyone wanting to understand the latest developments at the leading edge of the discipline can start here.

The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility, and related notions--are they objective features of mind-independent reality? If so, are they irreducible, or can modal facts be explained in other terms? This volume presents new work on modality by established leaders in the field and by up-and-coming philosophers. Between them, the papers address fundamental questions concerning realism and anti-realism about modality, the nature and basis of facts about what is possible and what is necessary, the nature of modal knowledge, modal logic and its relations to necessary existence and to counterfactual reasoning. The general introduction locates the individual contributions in the wider context of the contemporary discussion of the metaphysics and epistemology of modality.

In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice.
The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

These new essays on J. L. Austin's philosophy constitute the first major study of his thought in decades. Eight leading philosophers join together to present a fresh evaluation of his distinctive work, showing how it can be brought to bear on issues at the top of today's philosophical agenda, such as scepticism and contextualism, the epistemology of testimony, the generality of the conceptual, and the viability of the semantics/pragmatics distinction. The contributors offer in-depth interpretations of Austin's views and demonstrate why his work deserves a more central place in mainstream philosophical discussion than it currently has. The volumes also contains a substantial introduction that situates Austin's thought in its original intellectual milieu and provides an overview of the many different ways in which his ideas have influenced later developments, in philosophy and elsewhere.

Norms are a pervasive yet mysterious feature of social life. In Explaining Norms, four philosophers and social scientists team up to grapple with some of the many mysteries, offering a comprehensive account of norms: what they are; how and why they emerge, persist and change; and how they work. Norms, they argue, should be understood in non-reductive terms as clusters of normative attitudes that serve the function of making us accountable to one another--with the different kinds of norms (legal, moral, and social norms) differing in virtue of being constituted by different kinds of normative attitudes that serve to make us accountable in different ways. Explanations of and by norms should be seen as thoroughly pluralist in character. Explanations of norms should appeal to the ways that norms help us to pursue projects and goals, individually and collectively, as well as to enable us to constitute social meanings. Explanations by norms should recognise the multiplicity of ways in which norms may bear upon the actions we perform, the attitudes we form and the modes of deliberation in which we engage: following, merely conforming with, and even breaching norms. While advancing novel and distinctive positions on all of these topics, Explaining Norms will also serve as a sourcebook with a rich array of arguments and illustrations for others to reassemble in ways of their own choosing.

This book proposes that technologies, similar to texts, novels and movies, 'tell stories' and thereby configure our lifeworld in the Digital Age. The impact of technologies on our lived experience is ever increasing: innovations in robotics challenge the nature of work, emerging biotechnologies impact our sense of self, and blockchain-based smart contracts profoundly transform interpersonal relations. In their exploration of the significance of these technologies, Reijers and Coeckelbergh build on the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricouer to construct a new, narrative approach to the philosophy and ethics of technology. The authors take the reader on a journey: from a discussion of the philosophy of praxis, via a hermeneutic notion of technical practice that draws on MacIntyre, Heidegger and Ricoeur, through the virtue ethics of Vallor, and Ricoeur's ethical aim, to the eventual construction of a practice method which can guide ethics in research and innovation. In its creation of a compelling hermeneutic ethics of technology, the book offers a concrete framework for practitioners to incorporate ethics in everyday technical practice.

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During his late period, Nietzsche is particularly concerned with the value that mankind attributes to truth. In dealing with that topic, Nietzsche is not primarly interested in the metaphysical disputes on truth, but rather in the effects that the "will to truth" has on the human being. In fact, he argues that the "faith in a value as such of truth" influenced Western culture and started the anthropological degeneration of the human type that characterizes European morality. To call into question the value of truth is therefore necessary, if one wants to help mankind to find her way in the labyrinth of nihilism. In this new addition to Nietzsche scholarship, Gori explores the origin and aim of the philosopher's late perspectival thought by merging the theoretical with the historical approach, with a special focus on the epistemological debate that influenced Nietzsche. As a result, the book provides a contextual reading of the issue that supports the idea that Nietzsche's attitude in addressing the problem of truth is, in a broad sense, pragmatic.

Mary Leng offers a defense of mathematical fictionalism, according to which we have no reason to believe that there are any mathematical objects. Perhaps the most pressing challenge to mathematical fictionalism is the indispensability argument for the truth of our mathematical theories (and therefore for the existence of the mathematical objects posited by those theories). According to this argument, if we have reason to believe anything, we have reason to believe that the claims of our best empirical theories are (at least approximately) true. But since claims whose truth would require the existence of mathematical objects are indispensable in formulating our best empirical theories, it follows that we have good reason to believe in the mathematical objects posited by those mathematical theories used in empirical science, and therefore to believe that the mathematical theories utilized in empirical science are true. Previous responses to the indispensability argument have focussed on arguing that mathematical assumptions can be dispensed with in formulating our empirical theories. Leng, by contrast, offers an account of the role of mathematics in empirical science according to which the successful use of mathematics in formulating our empirical theories need not rely on the truth of the mathematics utilized.

'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.' These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry's collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood and the epistemic access to one's own thoughts, desires or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self.