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17Experience and the Objects of Perception (review)Review of Metaphysics 39 (1): 142-144. 1985.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 …Read more
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230Knowledge and Intellectual VirtueThe Monist 68 (2): 226-245. 1985.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 v…Read more
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36Replies to my criticsCritica 42 (125): 77-93. 2010.This paper is a response to the four critics of A Virtue Epistemology. It responds to Claudia Lorena García, Miguel Ángel Fernández, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Ram Neta, in that order. Este artículo es una respuesta a los cuatro críticos de A Virtue Epistemology. Ofrece respuestas a Claudia Lorena García, Miguel Ángel Fernández, Jonathan Kvanvig, y Ram Neta, en ese orden.
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849A defense of the use of intuitions in philosophyIn Michael Bishop & Dominic Murphy (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Blackwell. pp. 101--112. 2009.
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87The essentials of personsDialectica 53 (3-4): 227-41. 1999.This paper tries to clarify the nature of philosophical questions as to the ontological nature of things, especially persons. It considers implications of an Aristotelian account, which leads to an ontology that makes subjects and other things epistemologically remote. This makes the account doubtfully reconcilable with the special epistemic relation that each of us has to oneself, via for example the cogito.
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44De re belief, action explanations, and the essential indexicalIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Diana Raffman & Nicholas Asher (eds.), Modality, morality, and belief: essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus, Cambridge University Press. pp. 235--249. 1995.
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31Roderick Milton Chisholm 1916-1999Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 72 (5). 1999.
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298Can There Be a Discipline of Philosophy? And Can It Be Founded on Intuitions?Mind and Language 26 (4): 453-467. 2011.This paper takes up the critique of armchair philosophy drawn by some experimental philosophers from survey results. It also takes up a more recent development with increased methodological sophistication. The argument based on disagreement among respondents suggests a much more serious problem for armchair philosophy and puts in question the standing of our would-be discipline
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225How to resolve the pyrrhonian problematic: A lesson from Descartes (review)Philosophical Studies 85 (2-3): 229-249. 1997.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, aga…Read more
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331Rational intuition: Bealer on its nature and epistemic statusPhilosophical Studies 81 (2-3): 151--162. 1996.A discussion of George Bealer's conception and defense of rational intuition as a basis of philosophical knowledge, under three main heads: a) the phenomenology of intellectual intuition; b) the status of such intuition as a basic source of evidence, and the explanation of what gives it that status; and c) the defense of intuition against those who would reject it and exclude it on principle from the set of valid sources of evidence.
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9Metaphysics: an anthology (edited book)Blackwell. 1999.Thoroughly updated, the second edition of this highly successful textbook continues to represent the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of canonical readings in metaphysics. In addition to updated material from the first edition, it presents entirely new sections on ontology and the metaphysics of material objects. One of the most comprehensive and authoritative metaphysics anthologies available - now updated and expanded Offers the most important contemporary works on the central i…Read more
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3Skepticism and the internal/external divideIn John Greco & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 145--57. 1999.
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67Propositional knowledgePhilosophical Studies 20 (3). 1969.The received definition of knowledge (as true, evident belief) has recently been questioned by Edmund Gettier with an example whose principle is as follows. A proposition, p, is both evident to and accepted by someone S, who sees that its truth entails (would entail) (that either p is true or q is true). This last is thereby made evident to him, and he accepts it, but it happens to be true only because q is true, since p is in fact false. Hence, inasmuch as he has no evidence for the proposition…Read more
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10Reliability andIn John Hawthorne & Tamar Szabó Gendler (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 369. 2002.
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16Berkeley's master strokeIn John Foster & Howard Robinson (eds.), Essays on Berkeley: a tercentennial celebration, Oxford University Press. 1985.
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639Value Matters in EpistemologyJournal of Philosophy 107 (4): 167-190. 2010.In what way is knowledge better than merely true belief? That is a problem posed in Plato’s Meno. A belief that falls short of knowledge seems thereby inferior. It is better to know than to get it wrong, of course, and also better than to get it right by luck rather than competence. But how can that be so, if a true belief will provide the same benefits? In order to get to Larissa you do not need to know the way. A true belief will get you there just as well. Is it really always better to know t…Read more
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102Epistemology, realism, and truth: The first philosophical perspectives lecturePhilosophical Perspectives 7 1-16. 1993.Truth centered epistemology puts truth at the center in more ways than one. For one thing, it makes truth a main cognitive goal of inquiry. For another, it explains other main epistemic concepts in terms of truth. Knowledge itself, for example, is explained as belief that meets certain other conditions, among them being true. And a belief is said to be rationally or epistemically justified or apt, which it must be in order to be knowledge, only if it derives from a truth-conducive faculty, an in…Read more
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2Knowledge: Instrumental and testimonialIn Jennifer Lackey & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Epistemology of Testimony, Oxford University Press. pp. 116--123. 2006.