If asked what Humeanism could mean today, there is no other philosopher to turn to whose work covers such a wide range of topics from a unified Humean perspective as that of David Lewis. The core of Lewis's many contributions to philosophy, including his work in philosophical ontology, intensional logic and semantics, probability and decision theory, topics within philosophy of science as well as a distinguished philosophy of mind, can be understood as the development of philosophical position that is centered around his conception of Humean supervenience. If we accept the thesis that it is...

Since Descartes, one of the central questions of Western philosophy has been that of how we know that the objects we seem to perceive are real. Philosophical skeptics claim that we know no such thing. Representationalists claim that we can gain such knowledge only by inference, by showing that the hypothesis of a real world is the best explanation for the kind of sensations and mental images we experience. Both accept the doctrine of a 'veil of perception: ' that perception can only give us direct awareness of images or representations of objects, not the external objects themselves. In...

This book is a defense of realism about truth. The author argues that the most plausible version of realism is a correspondence theory of Truth that takes thought as the primary bearer of truth value. Anti-realists about Truth have seemed to argue that one cannot make sense of a world of 'truth-makers' that exists independently of representations of that world. While it may be true that there is no Truth without minds, one still needs the category of representation--independent fact, the author argues, to serve as truth-maker. In embracing this form of realism, the author does not want to...

In this collection of nine essays, Will demonstrates that a social account of human knowledge is consistent with, and ultimately requires, realism.

Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgements. This volume brings together a group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these issues. It contains a collection of essays discussing intuition from two different perspectives. They also cover how psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical enquiry.

Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgements. This volume brings together a group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these issues. It contains a collection of essays discussing intuition from two different perspectives. They also cover how psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical enquiry.

Modern epistemology has run into several paradoxes in its efforts to explain how knowledge acquisition can be both socially based (and thus apparently context-relative) and still able to determine objective facts about the world. In this important book, Richmond Campbell attempts to dispel some of these paradoxes, to show how they are ultimately just 'illusions of paradox, ' by developing ideas central to two of the most promising currents in epistemology: feminist epistemology and naturalized epistemology. Campbell's aim is to construct a coherent theory of knowing that is feminist and...

This exciting new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology. In addition, a new case is made for the strong connection between epistemology and artificial intelligence, as Pollock and Cruz argue that a necessary condition for the correctness of any epistemological theory is that it be possible to build an implemented artificial intelligence system on the basis of it. Like the first edition, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, Second Edition is an excellent teaching tool, introducing the...

The contributions in this volume make an important effort to resurrect a rather old fashioned form of foundationalism. They defend the position that there are some beliefs that are justified, and are not themselves justified by any further beliefs. This Epistemic foundationalism has been the subject of rigorous attack by a wide range of theorists in recent years, leading to the impression that foundationalism is a thing of the past. DePaul argues that it is precisely the volume and virulence of the assaults which points directly to the strength and coherence of the position.

There have been many books over the past decade, including outstanding collections of essays, on the topic of the ethical virtues and virtue-theoretic approaches in ethics. But the professional journals of philosophy have only recently seen a strong and growing interest in the intellectual virtues and in the development of virtue-theoretic approaches in epistemology. There have been four single-authored book length treatments of issues of virtue epistemology over the last seven years, beginning with Ernest Sosa's Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge, 1991), and extending to Linda Zabzebski's...