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490Epistemology: An Anthology (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2000.This volume represents the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of canonical readings in theory of knowledge. It is ideal as a reader for all courses in epistemology
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64Review: Proper functionalism and virtue epistemology (review)Noûs 27 (1). 1993.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…Read more
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58II_— _Ernest Sosa: Knowledge, Animal and Reflective: A Reply to Michael WilliamsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 (1): 113-130. 2003.I give an exposition and critical discussion of Sellars’s Myth of the Given, and especially of its epistemic side. In later writings Sellars takes a pragmatist turn in his epistemology. This is explored and compared with his earlier critique of givenist mythology. In response to Michael Williams, it is argued that these issues are importantly independent of philosophy of language or mind, and that my own take on them does not commit me to any absurd radical foundationalism on language or mind. M…Read more
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1773The Epistemology of DisagreementIn Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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107Are there two grades of knowledge?Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 (1). 2003.[Michael Williams] A response to Sosa's criticisms of Sellars's account of the relation between knowledge and experience, noting that Sellars excludes merely animal knowledge, and hopes to bypass epistemology by an adequate philosophy of mind and language. /// [Ernest Sosa] I give an exposition and critical discussion of Sellars's Myth of the Given, and especially of its epistemic side. In later writings Sellars takes a pragmatist turn in his epistemology. This is explored and compared with his …Read more
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56On our knowledge of matters of factMind 83 (331): 388-405. 1974.The traditional conception of knowledge as justified true belief has collapsed under weighty objections. Some of these are well known; but others, though equally weighty and puzzling, have attracted comparatively little attention, and still demand careful study. Only through such study can we approach correct understanding of propositional knowledge.
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21Imagery and ImaginationGrazer Philosophische Studien 25 (1): 485-499. 1985.1. Sensa and propositional experience. 2. An option between propositions and properties (as objects or contents of sensory experience). 3. The property option and adverbialism. 4. Sensa as images, images as intentionalia. 5. Do we refer directly to sensa? 6. Focusing and the supervenience of images and our reference to them: a question raised. 7. Internal and external properties of images and characters. Strict vistas introduced. 8. A correction on strict vistas. 9. Focusing and experience: the …Read more
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42Testimony and coherenceIn A. Chakrabarti & B. K. Matilal (eds.), Knowing From Words, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 59--67. 1994.
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260The epistemology of testimony (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2006.Testimony is a crucial source of knowledge: we are to a large extent reliant upon what others tell us. It has been the subject of much recent interest in epistemology, and this volume collects twelve original essays on the topic by some of the world's leading philosophers. It will be the starting point for future research in this fertile field. Contributors include Robert Audi, C. A. J. Coady, Elizabeth Fricker, Richard Fumerton, Sanford C. Goldberg, Peter Graham, Jennifer Lackey, Keith Lehrer, …Read more
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34Natural theology and naturalist atheology: Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalismIn Deane-Peter Baker (ed.), Alvin Plantinga, Cambridge University Press. 2007.
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97Reflective knowledgeOxford University Press. 2009.The second part of the book presents an alternative beyond the historical positions of Part I, one that defends a virtue epistemology combined with epistemic ...
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1Plantinga on Epistemic InternalismIn Jonathan L. Kvanvig (ed.), Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology, Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 73-87. 1996.
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230How Must Knowledge Be Modally Related to What Is Known?Philosophical Topics 26 (1-2): 373-384. 1999.
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99Surviving mattersNoûs 24 (2): 297-322. 1990.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…Read more
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121RepliesPhilosophical Papers 40 (3). 2004.Philosophical Papers, Volume 40, Issue 3, Page 341-358, November 2011
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150Mind-body interaction and supervenient causationMidwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1): 271-81. 1984.The mind-body problem arises because of our status as double agents apparently en rapport both with the mental and with the physical. We think, desire, decide, plan, suffer passions, fall into moods, are subject to sensory experiences, ostensibly perceive, intend, reason, make believe, and so on. We also move, have a certain geographical position, a certain height and weight, and we are sometimes hit or cut or burned. In other words, human beings have both minds and bodies. What is the relation …Read more
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224Relevant alternatives, contextualism includedPhilosophical Studies 119 (1-2): 35-65. 2004.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 h…Read more
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971For the Love of Truth?In Linda Zagzebski & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 49-62. 2000.Rational beings pursue and value truth . Intellectual conduct is to be judged, accordingly, by how well it aids our pursuit of that ideal. I ask whether these platitudes mean, and whether they are true.
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121Varieties of CausationGrazer Philosophische Studien 11 (1): 93-103. 1980.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 …Read more
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7Philosophical Issues, Action TheoryWiley-Blackwell. 2012.This is a collection of papers on action theory, very broadly conceived. It contains cutting-edge work by some of the most important contributors in the field
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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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106Responses to four criticsPhilosophical Studies 166 (3): 625-636. 2013.This alleged disagreement is only verbal, however, given my anti-intellectualist conception of a suitably broad category of ‘‘belief.’’ Although this broad conception figures large in my earlier writings, it figures not at all in the book under discussion, which helps explain H&H’s reaction. Here now is how I make the relevant distinctions and try to clarify what reflective knowledge amounts to, and how it comes in degrees