A stellar line-up of leading philosophers from around the world offer new treatments of a topic which has long been central to philosophical debate, and in which there has recently been a surge of interest. The a priori is the category of knowledge that is supposed to be independent of experience. The contributors offer a variety of approaches to the a priori and examine its role in different areas of philosophical inquiry. The editors' introduction offers an ideal way into the discussions.

Relativist and constructivist conceptions of truth and knowledge have become orthodoxy in vast stretches of the academic world in recent times. In his long-awaited first book, Paul Boghossian critically examines such views and exposes their fundamental flaws.
Boghossian focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed--one as a thesis about truth and two about justification. And he rejects all three. The intuitive, common-sense view is that there is a way the world is that is independent of human opinion; and that we are capable of arriving at...