Ernest Sosa

Comprehensive and packed, Alvin Plantinga's two-volume treatise defies summary. The first volume, Warrant: Current Views, is a meticulous critical survey of epistemology today. Many current approaches are presented and exhaustively discussed, and a negative verdict is passed on each in turn. This prepares the way for volume two, Warrant and Proper Function, where a positive view is advanced and developed in satisfying detail. The cumulative result is most impressive, and should command attention for years to come. Here I cannot possibly do justice to the scope and richness of Plantinga's accomplishment. Given the limitations imposed by the occasion, I will discuss only what seem the most important and original proposals, and will compare them with some relevant alternatives.

An intellectual virtue is a quality bound to help maximize one’s surplus of truth over error; or so let us assume for now, though a more just conception may include as desiderata also generality, coherence, and explanatory power, unless the value of these is itself explained as derivative from the character of their contribution precisely to one’s surplus of truth over error. This last is an issue I mention in order to lay it aside. Here we assume only a teleological conception of intellectual virtue, the relevant end being a proper relation to the truth, exact requirements of such propriety not here fully specified.

Since this paper is for a conference on “Contextualism in Epistemology and Beyond,” I have opted to sketch a retrospective of contextualism in epistemology, including highlights of the “relevant alternatives” approach, given how relevantism and contextualism have developed in tandem. We focus on externalist forms of contextualism, bypassing internalist forms such as Cohen 1988 and Lewis 1996, but much of our discussion will be applicable to contextualism generally. Internalist contextualism is helpfully discussed in papers by Stewart Cohen, Richard Feldman, and Jonathan Vogel, in Tomberlin 1999.

A Virtue Epistemology presents a new approach to some of the oldest and most gripping problems of philosophy, those of knowledge and scepticism. Ernest Sosa argues for two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective, each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. By adopting a kind of virtue epistemology in line with the tradition found in Aristotle, Aquinas, Reid, and especially Descartes, he presents an account of knowledge which can be used to shed light on different varieties of scepticism, the nature and status of intuitions, and epistemic normativity.

Life may turn sour and, in extremis, not worth living. On occasion it may be best, moreover, to lay down one's life for a greater cause. None of this is any news, debatable though it may remain, in general or case by case. Now comes the news that life does not matter in the way we had thought. No resurgence of existentialism, nor tidings from some ancient religion or some new cult, the news derives from the most sober and probing philosophical argument (the extraor- dinary Parfit, 1984, Part III), and takes more precisely the following form: Even though life L is optimal (in all dimensions), and even though if it were extended L would continue to be optimal, it does not follow that it is best to extend it, even for the subject whose life L is. What is the argument? Section II will defend a certain view of the nature of persons and personal identity, and Section III will then argue for the Paradox on that basis, and reflect on its philosophical implications and on the options it presents.

This study aims primarily at an account of sensory experience and perception uncommitted to objectual sense data or sense impressions. In the end it does make room for sense impressions, but only as entities somehow abstracted from phenomenological attention to sense experience. The "phenomenological standpoint" is attained by imagining "that a transparent screen has been placed at right angles about three feet from your eyes between you and all the objects before you," and by imagining further that the projection of the objects on such a screen has been cleverly painted on it so as to present an appearance just like that presented by the objects then actually before you. "It is to this possible picture that your attention must now be directed in order for you to be said to be attending to your sense experience itself".

According to nomological accounts of causation causal connections among events or states must be mediated by contingent laws of nature. Three types of causal connection are cited and discussed in opposition to such nomological accounts: (a) material causation (as when a zygote is generated by the union of an ovum and a sperm); (b) consequentialist causation (as when an apple is chromatically colored as a result of being red); (c) inclusive causation (as when a board is on a stump in consequence of its having been placed there by a carpenter). These are all source-consequence relations or result-yielding relations and they are all cases of necessitation, each with its own distinguishing features.

A main epistemic problematic, found already in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, presents a threefold choice on how a belief may be justified: either through infinitely regressive reasoning, or through circular reasoning, or through reasoning resting ultimately on some foundation. Aristotle himself apparently takes the foundationalist option when he argues that rational intuition is a foundational source of scientific knowledge. The five modes of Agrippa, which pertain to knowledge generally, again pose the same problematic, the “Pyrrhonian” problematic. And here Galen and the Stoics also opt for foundations. Sections I and II below explore that foundationalist option. Section III draws some lessons. And Section IV uses these to interpret Descartes. I argue that Descartes shows us the way beyond the Pyrrhonian problematic, although his way is not that traditionally attributed to him. On these basic issues of epistemology, Descartes is no Cartesian.