Ernest Sosa

Eleven pairs of newly commissioned essays face off on opposite sides of fundamental problems in current theories of knowledge. Brings together fresh debates on eleven of the most controversial issues in epistemology. Questions addressed include: Is knowledge contextual? Can skepticism be refuted? Can beliefs be justified through coherence alone? Is justified belief responsible belief? Lively debate format sharply defines the issues, and paves the way for further discussion. Will serve as an accessible introduction to the major topics in contemporary epistemology, whilst also capturing the imagination of professional philosophers.

This essay lays out the rationale for two principles — ascent and closure — and shows how they imply further principles of exclusion and of the criterion. These principles lead to the “Pyrrhonian Problematic”, which foundationalism and coherentism attempt to solve, and also to the clash of intuitions between internalists and externalists. It is argued that the kind of knowledge that externalists and foundationalists claim differs from the kind of knowledge that internalists and coherentists claim, and which Pyrrhonists doubt. This distinction between kinds of knowledge is traced back to Descartes’s distinction between cognitio and scientia. If this is correct, externalism and internalism might both be correct, and Pyrrhonism might turn out to be compatible with externalism.

Starting with its tenth volume, Philosophical Issues will be a yearly one-volume supplement to Nous. Each year it will be devoted to invited papers and book symposia in a specific area of philosophy. The yearly has attained distinction through the uniformly high quality of its previous nine volumes and the fact that its authors include many of the most distinguished philosophers active today. The topic of Volume 10 is controversies at the interface of epistemology with philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, including discussion of the sorites paradox and linguistic contextualism on attributions of knowledge.

This volume gathers papers by many of the best-known philosophers now at work on issues of realism and relativism across the field of philosophy. The result is representative of the best cutting-edge work in the area. Includes work both on the ontology and epistemology of the normative as well as on more general metaphysical and epistemological issues of relativism and realism Essays include discussions of relativism and the first-person perspective, underdetermination and realism, and mathematical realism and epistemic relativism, plus many other points of reflection.

It is a pleasure to continue a longstanding conversation with our honoree on questions about the nature of belief and how that bears on the theory of knowledge. Can belief be a sort of performance? Can it be motivated at all, much less properly motivated, by reasons that are pragmatic rather than epistemic? These are questions on which we disagree, under what Engel considers a more general clash over the sort of normativity that is proper to epistemology. He attributes to me a kind of teleological/axiological normativity, whereas he opts rather for a normativity that is deontic. In his view there are norms of belief, at a minimum a truth norm, and also a knowledge norm. You ought not to believe what is not true, nor even what you do not know to be true, see [Engel 2013], [Sosa 2013].