Epistemology category: 1240 books

Sometimes our intentions and beliefs exhibit a structure that proves us to be irrational. The Normativity of Rationality is concerned with the question of whether we ought to avoid such irrationality. Benjamin Kiesewetter defends the normativity of rationality by presenting a new solution to the problems...

Dancing with Absurdity explores the limitations of knowledge and argues that neither reasoning nor direct observation can be trusted. Not only are they unreliable sources, they do not even justify assigning probabilities to claims about what we can know. This position, called radical skepticism, has...

Belief is a fundamental concept within many branches of contemporary philosophy and an important subject in its own right. This volume comprises 11 original essays on belief written by a range of the best authors in the field.

may be complex without being able to be replaced by something »still more simple«. This became evident with the help of computer models of deterministic-recursive systems in which simple mathematical equation systems provide an extremely complex behavior. (2) Irregularity of nature is not treated...

Wisdom and Philosophy: Contemporary and Comparative Approaches questions the nature of the relationship between wisdom and philosophy from an intercultural perspective. Bringing together an international mix of respected philosophers, this volume discusses similarities and differences of Western and...

Alex Byrne sets out and defends a theory of self-knowledge-knowledge of one's mental states. Inspired by Gareth Evans' discussion of self-knowledge in his The Varieties of Reference, the basic idea is that one comes to know that one is in a mental state M by an inference from a worldly or environmental...

How can an infinite number of sentences be generated from one human mind? How did language evolve in apes? In this book Donald Loritz addresses these and other fundamental and vexing questions about language, cognition, and the human brain. He starts by tracing how evolution and natural adaptation...

The Life of the Mind presents an original and striking conception of the mind and its place in nature. In a spirited and rigorous attack on most of the orthodox positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, McCulloch connects three of the orthodoxy's central themes - externalism, phenomenology and...

What factors determine whether a person’s beliefs are epistemically rational? Many traditional accounts contend that those factors lie in the beliefs themselves. For example, a belief can fit with one’s evidence, it can originate in reliable (or otherwise virtuous) processes, or it can cohere...

Jonathan L. Kvanvig presents a conception of rationality which answers to the need arising out of the egocentric predicament concerning what to do and what to believe. He does so in a way that avoids, on the one hand, reducing rationality to the level of beasts, and on the other hand, elevating it...

Evidence and Agency is concerned with the question of how, as agents, we should take evidence into account when thinking about our future actions. Suppose you are promising or resolving to do something that you have evidence is difficult for you to do. For example, suppose you are promising to be...

Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on a train and start talking about what they believe. Their conversation varies from cool logical reasoning to heated personal confrontation. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right, but then doubts creep in. In a tradition...

Gabriel Seailles remarked that Lachelier had the happy for­ tune "of exercising a profound and decisive influence upon all who heard him, yet without acquiring perhaps a single disciple in the narrow sense of the word. He liberated minds. He rid them of 1 ready-made ideas. " This liberating...

When down from the moon stepped the goddess of the night, she bid Minerva/Athene come to her. "Minerva/Athene," she said, "you sprang fully formed from the head of your father. Now all the daughters of mankind think they, too, are as rootless as you. Tonight I bid you dance, join the...