Denis Maslov

Epistemic authority, according to L. Zagzebski’s theory, is essentially based on deliberative or first-personal reasons, which originate from epistemic admiration. In what follows, I shortly reconstruct her theory and try to defend it against two critical arguments. The first argument calls attention to circular relation of epistemic autonomy and authority. In order to determine the authoritative person for me, I always have to possess epistemic autonomy, which is understood as knowledge in the given domain. Thus I myself have to have authority in the given domain in order to invest authority. I try to show that the investment of trust is based upon autonomy interpreted as an ability to exercise epistemic actions, accompanied by normative foreknowledge, that allows us to assess epistemic abilities and invest our trust without having sufficient propositional knowledge. The second argument insists on theoretical control for authoritative evidence and testimony. That contradicts preemptive character and content-independence inherent to authoritative testimony. Hence, this argument entirely misses the point of epistemic authority. Instead, as I argue, one can control epistemic authority by future reflexion on its conscientiousness and epistemic exercise as well as on origins of my admiration for authority. As a consequence, the trust invested in authority can be withdrawn and redistributed.

The article considers John Greco's conception of testimonial knowledge that aims to overthrow three sceptical arguments against religious knowledge. Prof. Greco presupposes that a religious community already possesses a true religious belief and its reliability is justified exclusively by means of the reliability of transmission. The author puts this conception into question and presents some sceptical arguments regarding the initial origination of a religious belief and verifying the truth-ness of a religious belief in front of epistemic disagreement problem. In particular, he draws an attention on three moments: 1) difference between inside and outside position as to any religious community, 2) lack of inductive verifying evidence in support of religious knowledge, and 3) difference between origination a belief in a community for the first time and transmission of beliefs already given in a community. The author takes a perspective of an outsider who doesn't belong to any religious community (on the assumption that there are secular communities different from religious ones). Firstly, he suggests another from Greco's version of the “luck argument", which concerns the luck in origination of a belief, not the accidence in spreading it. John Greco solves a problem that arises from argument of luck as far as it regards transmission of beliefs inside a community. The author argues that the genuine problem is to establish an originating source of a religious belief, and taking that into consideration, testimonial evidence cannot eliminate this kind of luck. Secondly, he observes the problem of disagreement among different religious communities. He shows that an outsider doesn't have any epistemic reason to prefer one of the conflicting religious beliefs of different communities, for he doesn't belong to any of them. Thus, the problem of “epistemic peers" still remains unsolved.

In his response, D. Maslov (1) presents a sketch of a comparative analysis of the notion of ‘will’ in Wittgenstein and Hegel as a response to the initial article by K. Rodin. Despite apparent (but in some ways only seeming) differences, both philosophers show similar anti-metaphysical attitude in their respective analysis. Both regard will not as a metaphysical entity, but in its concrete expression in actions and intentions and conclude that acts of will and intentions can be understood by other people. (2) On this ground and the argument of universality of language, we argue, against K. Rodin, against anti-universalist and contextualist readings of Wittgenstein’s texts.

The paper aims to explicate the notion “ataraxia” in light of its untenable, as I argue, interpretation by M. Gabriel. This philosopher presupposes ataraxia as a total quietism and draws a conclusion, undesirable for Sextus, that the skeptical program of attaining the happiness, which is defined by Sextus as soul tranquility, is inconsistent since the sceptic can never be happy in virtue of incompatibility of inactivity with the skeptical investigation. The first part of the paper conveys the role of ataraxia in Sextus’ Pyrrhonism as it is interpreted by Gabriel. In the second part, we come to define ataraxia not as a total quietism, but as a suspension of all judgments and a freedom of all distress.