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29Epistemology: The Key Thinkers (edited book)Continuum. 2012.From Plato, through Descartes to W.V. Quine and Edmund Gettier, this concise introduction and reference guide explores the history of thinking about 'knowledge'.
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78Some fallibilist knowledge: Questioning knowledge-attributions and open knowledgeSynthese 198 (3): 2083-2099. 2019.We may usefully distinguish between one’s having fallible knowledge and having a fallibilist stance on some of one’s knowledge. A fallibilist stance could include a concessive knowledge-attribution. But it might also include a questioning knowledge-attribution. Attending to the idea of a QKA leads to a distinction between what we may call closed knowledge that p and open knowledge that p. All of this moves us beyond Elgin’s classic tale of the epistemic capacities of Holmes and of Watson, and to…Read more
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40Knowing (How It Is) That P: Degrees and Qualities of KnowledgeVeritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 50 (4). 2005.Pode o conhecimento de uma dada verdade admitir gradações? Sim, de fato, segundo o gradualismo deste artigo. O artigo introduz o conceito do saber-como que p – isto é, o conceito de saber como é que p. Saber-como que p é claramente gradual – admitindo gradações, dado que se pode saber mais ou menos como é que p. E a vinculação que este artigo faz entre sabercomo que p e saber que p revela que este último tipo de conhecimento também é gradual. A teoria dos criadores-deverdade [truthmakers] é, ent…Read more
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4Ginet on A Priori Knowledge: Skills and GradesVeritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 54 (2). 2009.---
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17After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions, by Robert Pasnau: New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. iii + 384, £55 (hardback) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1): 211-211. 2019.
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20What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology (edited book)Routledge. 2019.This book encourages renewed attention by contemporary epistemologists to an area most of them overlook: ancient philosophy. Readers are invited to revisit writings by Plato, Aristotle, Pyrrho, and others, and to ask what new insights might be gained from those philosophical ancestors. Are there ideas, questions, or lines of thought that were present in some ancient philosophy and that have subsequently been overlooked? Are there contemporary epistemological ideas, questions, or lines of thought…Read more
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18What Makes a Great Philosopher Great? Thirteen Arguments for Twelve Philosophers (edited book)Routledge. 2017.This book is inspired by a single powerful question. What is it to be great as a philosopher? No single grand answer is presumed to be possible; instead, rewardingly close studies of philosophical greatness are developed. This is a scholarly yet accessible volume, blending metaphilosophy with the long history of philosophy and traversing centuries and continents. The result is a series of case studies by accomplished scholars, each chapter trying to understand and convey a particular philosopher…Read more
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14Scepticism and Perceptual Justification edited by Dylan Dodd and Elia Zardini: New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, viii + 363, US$74 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 817-818. 2014.
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21Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy, by Peter Unger: New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. xiv + 258, US$45 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2): 418-419. 2016.
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12Should you be afraid? Aloneness scepticism and DescartesThink 17 (50): 15-25. 2018.Philosophers routinely claim that sceptical arguments are not only intellectually but also emotionally confronting. When students first meet these arguments, though, no fear arises. This article presents aloneness scepticism: you never know that other people are not aiming to deceive you or at least not caring about being truthful. Imagine raising this possibility in a classroom by directing it at a single student. He or she should feel fear.Export citation.
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45The Gettier Problem (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2018.When philosophers try to understand the nature of knowledge, they have to confront the Gettier problem. This problem, set out in Edmund Gettier's famous paper of 1963, has yet to be solved, and has challenged our best attempts to define what knowledge is. This volume offers an organised sequence of accessible and distinctive chapters explaining the history of debate surrounding Gettier's challenge, and where that debate should take us next. The chapters describe and evaluate a wide range of idea…Read more
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45After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions, by Robert Pasnau: New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. iii + 384, £55Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1): 211-211. 2019.
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44Knowledge as Potential for ActionEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 9 (2). 2017.Can we conceive cogently of all knowledge – in particular, all knowledge of truths – as being knowledge-how? This paper provides reasons for thinking not only that is this possible, but that it is conceptually advantageous and suggestive. Those reasons include adaptations of, and responses to, some classic philosophical arguments and ideas, from Descartes, Hume, Peirce, Mill, and Ryle. The paper’s position is thus a practicalism – a kind of pragmatism – about the nature of knowledge, arguing tha…Read more
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23Free Will as a Sceptical Threat to KnowingPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 3 (1). 1999.Sceptics standardly argue that a person lacks knowledge due to an inability to know that some dire possibility is not being actualised in her believing that p. I argue that the usual sceptical inventory of such possibilities should include one's possibly having had some freedom in forming one's belief that p. A sceptic should conclude that wherever there might have been some such freedom, there is no knowledge that p. (This is not to say that sceptics would be correct in that conclusion. It is j…Read more
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37Shattering a Cartesian Sceptical DreamPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 8 (1). 2004.Scepticism about external world knowledge is frequently claimed to emerge from Descartes’s dreaming argument. That argument supposedly challenges one to have some further knowledge — the knowledge that one is not dreaming that p — if one is to have even one given piece of external world knowledge that p. The possession of that further knowledge can seem espe-cially important when the dreaming possibility is genuinely Cartesian (with one’s dreaming that p being incompatible with the truth of one’…Read more
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Classic Philosophical Arguments: The Gettier Problem (edited book)Cambridge University Presss. forthcoming.
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14Knowledge Puzzles: An Introduction to EpistemologyPhilosophical Quarterly 49 (194): 109-111. 1996.
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16A Fallibilist and Wholly Internalist Solution to the Gettier ProblemJournal of Philosophical Research 26 307-324. 2001.How can a person avoid being Gettiered? This paper provides the first answer to that question that is both fallibilist and purely internalist. It is an answer that allows the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge to survive Gettier’s attack (albeit as a nonreductionist analysis of knowledge).
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14Tooley's Theory of Laws of NatureCanadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1): 101-114. 1983.This paper contains a discussion of a theory of laws of nature formulated recently by Michael Tooley. He sees the truth-makers for laws of nature as consisting of particular sorts of contingent relations between universals. He is not alone in this idea; it has also been advanced by Fred Dretske and D.M. Armstrong. However, its most thorough and detailed presentation is by Tooley. Being a challenging and stimulating idea, it merits investigation.
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Narcissistic EpistemologyDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1987.This dissertation questions two central presuppositions of traditional normative epistemology. The first, , is that the epistemologist's epistemic subject is a person--that the epistemologist is discussing you. The second, , is that the epistemologist's methodology is one of investigative detachment--that in principle his investigation is impartially of each of us. ;My arguments rely on a distinction between the epistemic subject qua epistemologist and qua non-epistemologist. The former is inter…Read more
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30Epistemology's Paradox: Is a Theory of Knowledge Possible?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (4): 976-979. 1994.
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14Reality? Knowledge? Philosophy!: An Introduction to Metaphysics and EpistemologyEdinburgh University Press. 2019.This textbook introduction offers a new way of approaching metaphysics and epistemology - via links to ethical and social questions. It asks questions such as: Fundamentally, what are we? And what, if anything, do we know?
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Recensioni/Reviews-Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge. On Two Dogmas of Epistemology (review)Epistemologia 27 (2): 353. 2004.
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6Jaakko Hintikka and Merrill Hintikka, The Logic of Epistemology and The Epistemology of Logic Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 10 (4): 144-146. 1990.
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188Tooley's Theory of Laws of NatureCanadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1). 1983.This paper contains a discussion of a theory of laws of nature formulated recently by Michael Tooley. He sees the truth-makers for laws of nature as consisting of particular sorts of contingent relations between universals. He is not alone in this idea; it has also been advanced by Fred Dretske and D.M. Armstrong. However, its most thorough and detailed presentation is by Tooley. Being a challenging and stimulating idea, it merits investigation.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Interest
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Epistemology |
Metaphilosophy |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
M&E, Misc |
Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies |