Graciela De Pierris presents a novel interpretation of the relationship between skepticism and naturalism in Hume's epistemology, and a new appraisal of Hume's place within early modern thought. Whereas a dominant trend in recent Hume scholarship maintains that there are no skeptical arguments concerning causation and induction in Book I, Part III of the Treatise, Graciela De Pierris presents a detailed reading of the skeptical argument she finds there and how this argument initiates a train of skeptical reasoning that begins in Part III and culminates in Part IV. This reasoning is framed by Hume's version of the modern theory of ideas developed by Descartes and Locke. The skeptical implications of this theory, however, do not arise, as in traditional interpretations of Hume's skepticism, from the 'veil of perception.' They arise from Hume's elaboration of a presentational-phenomenological model of ultimate evidence, according to which there is always a justificatory gap between what is or has been immediately presented to the mind and any ideas that go beyond it. This happens, paradigmatically, in the causal-inductive inference, and, as De Pierris argues, in demonstrative inference as well. Yet, in spite of his firm commitment to radical skepticism, Hume also accepts the naturalistic standpoint of science and common life, and he does so, on the novel interpretation presented here, because of an equally firm commitment to Newtonian science in general and the Newtonian inductive method in particular. Hume defends the Newtonian method (against the mechanical philosophy) while simultaneously rejecting all attempts (including those of the Newtonians) to find a place for the supernatural within our understanding of nature.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921, has had a profound influence on modern philosophic thought. Prototractatus is a facsimile reproduction of an early version of Tractatus, only discovered in 1965. The original text has a parallel English translation and the text is edited to indicate all relevant deviations from the final version.

Kant's influence on the history of philosophy is vast and protean. The transcendental turn denotes one of its most important forms, defined by the notion that Kant's deepest insight should not be identified with any specific epistemological or metaphysical doctrine, but rather concerns the fundamental standpoint and terms of reference of philosophical enquiry. To take the transcendental turn is not to endorse any of Kant's specific teachings, but to accept that the Copernican revolution announced in the Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason sets philosophy on a new footing and constitutes the proper starting point of philosophical reflection. The aim of this volume is to map the historical trajectory of transcendental philosophy and the major forms that it has taken. The contributions, from leading contemporary scholars, focus on the question of what the transcendental turn consists in-its motivation, justification, and implications; and the limitations and problems which it arguably confronts-with reference to the relevant major figures in modern philosophy, including Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. Central themes and topics discussed include the distinction of realism from idealism, the relation of transcendental to absolute idealism, the question of how transcendental conclusions stand in relation to (and whether they can be made compatible with) naturalism, the application of transcendental thought to foundational issues in ethics, and the problematic relation of phenomenology to transcendental enquiry.

This book examines the notion of 'the homely' which rests at the foundation of Gaston Bachelard's concrete metaphysics. In order to trace the development of this effaced notion through the history of contemporary Continental philosophy and literature, this study progresses along two distinct arcs. One is presented in a traditional chronological fashion whereby the reader is invited to dig down into the enormous chasm set forth in Martin Heidegger's writing and its reception; become lost in Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves; climb out from this labyrinth into the maternal home; and, finally, come slowly to rest in Gaston Bachelard's concrete metaphysics. Then a Bachelardian topoanalysis is applied to these images drawn from philosophy and literature, metaphysical and concrete expression, in order to follow a second, more significant arc along which progressively more primal spaces are uncovered. This second arc leads back, ultimately, to the foundation of concrete metaphysics: home. Through this topoanalysis the author articulates a fundamental insight about the human desire to have 'a place of one's own', a warm and comfortable, fixed and fixing space in which to set ourselves apart from the strife and turmoil of 'The World'.

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.

In this highly original book the author addresses the question of how we are to conceive of human reasoning in a situation where there are no global, privileged points of view. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo proposes a conception of thought based on a differencea -- a conception which accepts the fragmentation of knowledge and renounces the quest for totality. He also argues for an a ontology of declinea -- a conception of being which renounces all the strong characteristics attributed to it by traditional metaphysics and which instead, following Heidegger, links being to time, life and the rhythm of birth and death.

This book offers a readable introduction to the main aspects of thought experimenting in philosophy and science (together with related imaginative activities in mathematics and linguistics). It presents the main options in understanding thought experiments, from empiricism to Platonism, and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. However, it also provides some original perspectives on the topic. Firstly, it provides a new definition and analysis of thought experimenting that brings it closer to laboratory experimenting. Secondly, it develops the author's earlier theory of "mental modelling", proposed some decades ago by him, and some other researchers in the field as the crucial procedure in thought experimenting. The mental modelling approach links work with thought experimenting to cognitive science and to research on mental simulation which is a hot topic in present-day research. Thirdly, it proposes a principled way to respond to criticism of thought experimenting by "experimental philosophers" as they have been dominating the present-day debates. The response suggests a possible ameliorative, self-help project for thought experimenting. Finally, the book provides a way to systematize the history of important thought experiments in science and philosophy and thus connects, in an original way, the systematic investigation of experimenting to the historical work of famous thought experiments. It is of interest to scholars interested in history of ideas and philosophy of science.

Arthapatti is a pervasive form of reasoning investigated by Indian philosophers in order to think about unseen causes and interpret ordinary and religious language. Its nature is a point of controversy among Mimamsa, Nyaya, and Buddhist philosophers, yet, to date, it has received less attention than perception, inference, and testimony. This collection presents a one-of-a-kind reference resource for understanding this form of reasoning studied in Indian philosophy. Assembling translations of central primary texts together with newly-commissioned essays on research topics, it features a significant introductory essay. Readable translations of Sanskrit works are accompanied by critical notes that introduce arthapatti, offer historical context, and clarify the philosophical debates surrounding it. Showing how arthapatti is used as a way to reason about the basic unseen causes driving language use, cause-and-effect relationships, as well as to interpret ambiguous or figurative texts, this book demonstrates the importance of this epistemic instrument in both contemporary Anglo-analytic and classical Indian epistemology, language, and logic.

This volume argues that theistic philosophy should be seen not as an "armchair" enterprise but rather as a critical endeavor to bring philosophy of religion into close contact with emerging sciences of religion. This text engages with the rationality of religious belief by investigating central problems and arguments in philosophy of religion from the perspective of new naturalistic research. A central question the book analyzes is whether findings in cognitive science of religion (CSR) falsify or undermine religious ideas and beliefs. With regard to CSR, this volume offers a sustained and critical investigation of the neutrality and positive-relevance view, before offering a re-appraisal of the conflict view. The text argues that when scrutinizing these views, much more attention must be paid to specific normative premises that allow empirical findings to have epistemic relevance. A novel feature is the theoretical application of analytical epistemology in virtue-epistemology to the central question of whether CSR undermines, supports, or is neutral with respect to religious belief. This book appeals to upper-level students and researchers in the field.

This book explores the methodological strategies for linking philosophy and neuroscience concerning the study of the conscious brain. The author focuses on four distinct methods for relating these two academic disciplines: isolationist, reductionist, neurophenomenological, and non-reductionist. After analyzing the pros and cons of these approaches, Steven S. Gouveia applies them to the concept of Qualia and Information to understand how the metaphilosophical assumptions of each approach influence the definitions of those specific concepts. Gouveia argues for an approach that conceives the interdisciplinarity of both philosophy and neuroscience, in a particular and sound methodology, offering empirical examples of the explanatory power of this methodology over the others. Additionally, he shows how the metaphilosophical assumptions of each methodology-usually taken by researchers implicitly and unconsciously-influence their own approach to the methodological problem.

Deflationist accounts of truth are widely held in contemporary philosophy: they seek to show that truth is a dispensable concept with no metaphysical depth. However, logical paradoxes present problems for deflationists that their work has struggled to overcome. In this volume of fourteen original essays, a distinguished team of contributors explore the extent to which, if at all, deflationism can accommodate paradox. The volume will be of interest to philosophers of logic, philosophers of language, and anyone working on truth.
Contributors include Bradley Armour-Garb, Jody Azzouni, JC Beall, Hartry Field, Christopher Gauker, Michael Glanzberg, Dorothy Grover, Anil Gupta, Volker Halbach, Leon Horsten, Paul Horwich, Graham Priest, Greg Restall, and Alan Weir

Mark Eli Kalderon presents an original study in the philosophy of perception written in the medium of historiography. He considers the phenomenology and metaphysics of sensory presentation through the examination of an ancient aporia. Specifically, he argues that a puzzle about perception at a distance is behind Empedocles' theory of vision. Empedocles conceives of perception as a mode of material assimilation, but this raises a puzzle about color vision, since color vision seems to present colors that inhere in distant objects. But if the colors inhere in distant objects how can they be taken in by the organ of sight and so be palpable to sense? Aristotle purports to resolve this puzzle in his definition of perception as the assimilation of sensible form without the matter of the perceived particular. Aristotle explicitly criticizes Empedocles, though he is keen to retain the idea that perception is a mode of assimilation, if not a material mode. Aristotle's notorious definition has long puzzled commentators. Kalderon shows how, read in light of Empedoclean puzzlement about the sensory presentation of remote objects, Aristotle's definition of perception can be better understood. Moreover, when so read, the resulting conception of perception is both attractive and defensible.

We often talk about groups believing, knowing, and testifying. For instance, we ask whether the Bush Administration had good reasons for believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or whether BP knew that its equipment was faulty before the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Epistemic claims of this sort often have enormously significant consequences, given the ways they bear on the moral and legal responsibilities of collective entities. Despite the importance of these epistemic claims, there has been surprisingly little philosophical work shedding light on these phenomena, their consequences, and the broader implications that follow for epistemology in general. Essays in Collective Epistemology aims to fill this gap in the literature by bringing together new papers in this area by some of the leading figures in social epistemology. The volume is divided into four parts and contains ten articles written on a range of topics in collective epistemology. All of the papers focus on fundamental issues framing the epistemological literature on groups, and offer new insights or developments to the current debates: some do so by providing novel examinations of the epistemological relationship that groups bear to their members, while others point to new, cutting edge approaches to theorizing about concepts and issues related to collective entities. Anyone working in epistemology, or concerned with issues involving the social dimensions of knowledge, should find the papers in this book both interesting and valuable.

The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy will be the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field. It will feature papers by philosophers, papers by psychologists, and papers co-authored by people in both disciplines. The series heralds the emergence of a truly interdisciplinary field in which people from different disciplines are working together to address a shared set of questions.
The inaugural volume is roughly structured into four sections. The first three papers focus on recent developments in moral psychology, a topic that has seen lively debate and a great deal of progress over the last decade. The second section highlights three contributions that bring new methods to moral psychology: formal modeling and special populations. The third section brings together four papers that adopt an experimental philosophy approach to novel topics, including intuitive dualism, generics, joint action, and happiness. And the last two papers provide critical and historical context to the development of experimental philosophy.

In this sequel to the highly acclaimed Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth , Psillos discusses recent developments in scientific realism and explores realist theses and commitments. He examines the structuralist turn in the philosophy of science and offers a framework within which inference to the best explanation can be defended.

Causation is now commonly supposed to involve a succession that instantiates some law-like regularity. Efficient Causation: A History examines how our modern notion developed from a very different understanding of efficient causation. This volume begins with Aristotle's initial conception of efficient causation, and then considers the transformations and reconsiderations of this conception in late antiquity, medieval and modern philosophy, ending with contemporary accounts of causation. It includes four short "Reflections" that explore the significance of the concept for literature, the history of music, the history of science, and contemporary art theory.

Sensory experience seems to be the basis of our knowledge and conception of mind-independent things. The puzzle is to understand how that can be: even if the things we experience (apples, tables, trees etc), are mind-independent how does our sensory experience of them enable us to conceive of them as mind-independent? George Berkeley thought that sensory experience can only provide us with the conception of mind-dependent things, things which cannot exist when they aren't being perceived. It's easy to dismiss Berkeley's conclusion but harder to see how to avoid it. In this book, John Campbell and Quassim Cassam propose very different solutions to Berkeley's Puzzle. For Campbell, sensory experience can be the basis of our knowledge of mind-independent things because it is a relation, more primitive than thought, between the perceiver and high-level objects and properties in the mind-independent world. Cassam opposes this 'relationalist' solution to the Puzzle and defends a 'representationalist' solution: sensory experience can give us the conception of mind-independent things because it represents its objects as mind-independent, but does so without presupposing concepts of mind-independent things. This book is written in the form of a debate between two rival approaches to understanding the relationship between concepts and sensory experience. Although Berkeley's Puzzle frames the debate, the questions addressed by Campbell and Cassam aren't just of historical interest. They are among the most fundamental questions in philosophy.

This book addresses the questions of what constitutes the integrative learning of theory and practice (ILTP), and how this learning progresses over time - these are important questions that have been overlooked to date. It introduces a new way of looking at the theory-practice integration and presents the conceptual and empirical research that has led to such a view. The conceptualisation of the ILTP and the description of the phenomenon of integration draw on psychological aspects of epistemological beliefs in TVET, and on philosophical aspects of social reasoning. In this inferentialist, non-dualistic epistemological perspective, theory and practice are distinguished in terms of their use in reasoning, rather than as intrinsically different forms of knowledge. In particular, the integrative learning is presented in terms of qualitative changes in chains of reasoning that connect theoretical and practical considerations. This work represents a contribution to further educational research, as it advances a novel operationalisation of the inferentialist framework. Finally, this work contributes to educational practice, as it offers evidence-based guidelines for practitioners concerned with instructional design in T-VET. The reported empirical investigations involved in-depth qualitative research methods and were conducted at a micro-level of instruction in alternating school-based and work-based programmes, in the field of Chemicals Processing Technology (CPT).

Is religious faith consistent with being an intellectually virtuous thinker? In seeking to answer this question, one quickly finds others, each of which has been the focus of recent renewed attention by epistemologists: What is it to be an intellectually virtuous thinker? Must all reasonable belief be grounded in public evidence? Under what circumstances is a person rationally justified in believing something on trust, on the testimony of another, or because of the conclusions drawn by an intellectual authority? Can it be reasonable to hold a belief on a topic over which there is significant, entrenched disagreement among informed inquirers, or should such disagreement lead all parties to modify or suspend their own judgments? Is there anything about faith that exempts it from measurement against such epistemic norms? And if we would so evaluate it, how exactly should we understand the intellectual commitments faith requires? The volume's introduction provides a roadmap of the central issues and controversies as currently discussed by philosophers. In fourteen new essays written to engage nonspecialists as well as philosophers working in religion and epistemology, a diverse and distinguished group of thinkers then consider the place of intellectual virtue in religious faith, exploring one or more of the specific issues noted above.

Why do people and groups ignore, deny and resist knowledge about society's many problems? In a world of 'alternative facts', 'fake news' that some believe could be remedied by 'factfulness', the question has never been more pressing. After years of ideologically polarised debates on the topic, this book seeks to further advance our understanding of the phenomenon of knowledge resistance by integrating insights from the social, economic and evolutionary sciences. It identifies simplistic views in public and scholarly debates about what facts, knowledge and human motivations are and what 'rational' use of information actually means. The examples used include controversies about nature-nurture, climate change, gender roles, vaccination, genetically modified food and artificial intelligence. Drawing on cutting-edge scholarship and personal experiences of culture clashes, the book is aimed at the general, educated public as well as students and scholars interested in the interface of human motivation and the urgent social problems of today. -- .

Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief contains fourteen original essays by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists on challenges to moral and religious belief from disagreement and evolution. Three main questions are addressed: Can one reasonably maintain one's moral and religious beliefs in the face of interpersonal disagreement with intellectual peers? Does disagreement about morality between a religious belief source, such as a sacred text, and a non-religious belief source, such as a society's moral intuitions, make it irrational to continue trusting one or both of those belief sources? Should evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral beliefs and our religious beliefs undermine our confidence in their veracity? This volume places challenges to moral belief side-by-side with challenges to religious belief, sets evolution-based challenges alongside disagreement-based challenges, and includes philosophical perspectives together with theological and social science perspectives, with the aim of cultivating insights and lines of inquiry that are easily missed within a single discipline or when these topics are treated in isolation. The result is a collection of essays--representing both skeptical and non-skeptical positions about morality and religion--that move these discussions forward in new and illuminating directions.

Infinitism is an ancient view in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification, according to which there are no foundational reasons for belief. The view has never been popular, and is often associated with skepticism, but after languishing for centuries it has recently begun a resurgence. Ad Infinitum presents new work on the topic by leading epistemologists. They shed new light on infinitism's distinctive strengths and weaknesses, and address questions, new and old, about its account of justification, reasoning, epistemic responsibility, disagreement, and trust, among other important issues. The volume clarifies the relationship between infinitism and other epistemological views, such as skepticism, coherentism, foundationalism and contextualism, and it offers novel perspectives on the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of regresses and reasons.

This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of "footprint" and "trace". It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science. This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others.

The subtitle of this book should be read as a qualification as much as an elaboration of the title. If the goal were completeness, then this book would have included essays on the work of other philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars, Nicholas Rescher, Donald Davidson, Gilbert Harman and Michael Williams. Although it would be incorrect to say that each of these writers has set forth a version of the coherence theory of justification and knowledge, it is clear that their work is directly relevant, and reaction to it could easily fill a companion volume. This book concentrates, however, on the theories of Keith Lehrer and Laurence BonJour, and I doubt that any epistemologist would deny that they are presently the two leading proponents of coherentism. A sure indication of this was the ease with which the papers in this volume were solicited and delivered. The many authors represented here were willing, prepared, and excited to join in the discussion of BonJour's and Lehrer's recent writings. I thank each one personally for agreeing so freely to contribute. All of the essays but two are published for the first time here. Marshall Swain's and Alvin Goldman's papers were originally presented at a symposium on BonJour's The Structure of Empirical Knowledge at the annual meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, Illinois, in April, 1987.

One of the hardest problems in the history of Western philosophy has been to explain whether and how experience can provide knowledge (or even justification for belief) about the objective world outside the experiencer's mind. A prominent brand of scepticism has precisely denied that experience can provide such knowledge. How, for instance (these sceptics ask) can I know that my experiences are not produced in me by a powerful demon (or, in a modern twist on that traditional Cartesian scenario, by a supercomputer)? This volume, originating from the research project on Basic Knowledge recently concluded at the Northern Institute of Philosophy, presents new essays on scepticism about the senses written by some of the most prominent contemporary epistemologists. They approach the sceptical challenge by discussing such topics as the conditions for perceptual justification, the existence of a non-evidential kind of warrant and the extent of one's evidence, the epistemology of inference, the relations between justification, probability and certainty, the relevance of subjective appearances to the epistemology of perception, the role that broadly pragmatic considerations play in epistemic justification, the contents of perception, and the function of attention. In all these cases, the papers show how philosophical progress on foundational issues can improve our understanding of and possibly afford a solution to a historically prominent problem like scepticism.