Aaron Creller

What is the aim of inquiry? One notable answer in recent epistemology answers this question with “understanding,” rather than just with true belief or knowledge. A common rationale is that true belief and knowledge can be gained by “offloading” cognitive work to others, where offloading cognitive work prevents one from satisfying curiosity of the sort that is needed to properly “close” inquiry. If this is right, then it looks like the very idea that understanding is the aim of inquiry seems to fit closely with the related idea that the aim of inquiry is one we attain not through outsourcing or epistemic dependence, but just through our own efforts. This chapter challenges this association by bringing together work on the nature of understanding in epistemology with recent work on transactive memory and cognitive enhancement. It is shown that even if we grant the premise that only through the satisfaction of curiosity is the aim of a given inquiry properly closed, this aim can be attained through (even extensive) offloading; the argument develops appeals to (i) via offloading in the case of interactive cueing in the case of transactive memory systems and (ii) understanding via offloading in the case of biomedical cognitively enhanced understanding. The result is a new space for vindicating understanding as the aim of inquiry that is not essentially tied to the idea that to play this role understanding must stand in tension with (various kinds of) offloading, outsourcing, and dependence.

Inquiry is a fundamental human practice. We have questions, and we want answers. These questions span numerous domains and range from the trivial to questions of the utmost importance. Without inquiry, and successful inquiry in particular, our fate is bleak. Inquiry is also familiar. Everyone engages in inquiry. In fact, inquiry (of some sort) is something that we engage in every day. However, while inquiry is both fundamental and familiar, only recently have epistemologists turned to focus explicitly on inquiry. The result is a growing literature concerning questions like the following: Does inquiry have an aim? If so, what is the aim of inquiry? What norms govern inquiry? How are epistemic norms and norms of inquiry related? What does inquiry look like with an epistemic division of labor? Is it ever permissible to interfere with the inquiry of another person? What is the relationship between inquiry and belief? Knowledge? Wisdom? How do bias and prejudice affect inquiry? What is the nature and role of attitudes like curiosity and wonder? The chapters of this volume build on the existing debates surrounding these questions, advancing them, and taking them in new directions.

There is a tension between the pedagogical aim of comparative and cross-cultural inclusion and teaching an introductory-level deductive logic course. On the one hand, those who are interested in including non-“Western” sources are doing so in order to expand the philosophical content under consideration in their courses. On the other, it seems that the student learning objectives for deductive logic classes aimed at novices are narrow and specific for the purpose of developing a particular skill. This paper highlights the challenge of teaching logic cross-culturally by arguing that it is inadvisable to do so. Using Jain logic as a case study, it illustrates that even though there is depth available in the content, the contextual support needed to compare logics without being reductive would interfere with the amount of time needed to develop deductive logic skills in students in the first place.

Why decolonize knowledge and philosophy? Pascah Mungwini proposes that epistemic decolonization should be implemented to remain true to the spirit of philosophy and to the idea of humanity. Aaron Creller, Michael Monahan, and Esme Murdock focus on different aspects of Mungwini’s proposal in their individual responses. Creller suggests some “best practices” so that comparative epistemology can take into account the parochial embeddedness of universal reason. While Monahan underscores that world philosophy as a project must openly acknowledge its own incompleteness and its instantiation in different world philosophies, Esme Murdock uses Glissant’s thoughts to make a case for the right to opacity as a strategy for subverting the dominating power of Euroamerican reason. In his reply, Mungwini underscores that philosophy will be able to increase the amount of justice, beauty, and truth in this world only when its practitioners begin to exhibit genuine pluralism in their work.

The topic of â oeConflict and Harmonyâ exists across many cultures. As a collection of essays from comparative philosophers around the world, this volume represents the latest research on cross-cultural approaches to issues of conflict and the possibilities of harmony. Composed of papers presented at the 2013 Joint Meeting of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the Australasian Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, the book offers contributions from both early career academics and long-standing researchers, with topics spanning various historical times and places. Subjects explored here include approaches to classical understandings of harmony and conflict from different contexts, the connection embodied experience has with conflict and harmony, and political approaches to harmony and conflict. Through discussions of Indian, Chinese, Greek, and contemporary philosophy, these papers represent the cutting edge of comparative work and its overlaps with history, religious studies, and political science.

The main political responsibility of the legislator to the citizens is to create laws and institutions for the sake of promoting the virtues of citizens. In Plato’s Laws, there is a tension between desiring a strong sense of virtue for the population while settling into a pessimistic acceptance of the inability of most humans to even approach it. This article draws out the tension between a strong sense of virtue and amore practical and achievable sense of virtue within the text by examining sōphrosunē as the key method of raising up the citizen. Considered in contrast to the legislators’ attempts to instil self-control and moderation in the citizens are the ways in which the legislators undermine their own project through indoctrination, coercion and the lack of opportunities to practise sōphrosunē.

This dissertation is an intervention in mainstream western epistemology, especially as it relates to theories of knowledge, knowing, and knowers. Through its focus on propositional knowledge, contemporary mainstream epistemology has narrowed the scope of the definition of "knowledge" to a point where it fails to accurately describe the structure of knowing and prevents a genuine understanding of "knowledge" across cultural boundaries. In the first chapter, I explain how this narrow definition stems from an anachronistic historical narrative that stresses knowledge as justified true belief and focuses principally on propositions. In the second chapter, I illustrate not only how this narrow definition has prevented analytic epistemology from adequately integrating its own accounts of non-propositional knowledge (i.e. skill-based knowledge or interpersonal knowledge), but also on how it fails to account for the structure of propositional knowledge itself. This narrow account prevents propositional knowledge from explaining what it claims it can without the explanatory assistance of a robust, capacious account of knowledges, particularized knowers, and personalized knowing. In the third chapter, I construct an alternative in response to this narrow definition by using resources within hermeneutics and Michael Polanyi's work on tacit knowing. My alternative responds to the inability of proposition-focused epistemology to adequately account for knowing-that, as well as a variety of other kinds of knowing that are irreducible to knowing-that or each other. This reopens the space constrained by a singleminded fixation on propositions in order to better account for knowledge in its various forms. Once this space has been opened up, it makes possible a more cross-cultural, comparative approach to knowledge because it does not reduce other cultures' and traditions' accounts of knowing or knowledge to a propositional form. I explain this in the fourth chapter by considering the case of the epistemically rich term 知zhi in Warring States era Chinese thought, which I argue is a robust philosophical culture. In short, because a narrow search for explicit principles constricts epistemology, a capacious alternative is required to gain mobility amongst perspectives on knowledge for the sake of understanding the process of knowing.

Steve Coutinho's Zhuangzi and Early Chinese Philosophy: Vagueness, Transformation and Paradox, is a comparative philosophy project masterfully carried out on two levels, the methodological and the interpretive. Coutinho provides a translation of the Zhuangzi that is both contextually rooted and philosophically rich. Whether or not one agrees with Coutinho's interpretation, there is much to be gleaned from his book. The first few chapters create a meta-philosophical structure that the rest of the book puts to use. Given the lucid movement from development to application, there is something here for both the newcomer to comparative philosophy and those well versed in Warring States Chinese philosophy. To readers in..