Hans Roth

Many claim that political deliberation has become exceedingly affective, and hence, destabilizing. The authors of this book revisit that assumption. While recognizing that significant changes are occurring, these authors also point out the limitations of turning to contemporary democratic theory to understand and unpack these shifts. They propose, instead, to reframe this debate by deploying the analytic framework of _affective societies_, which highlights how affect and emotion are present in all aspects of the social. What changes over time and place are the modes and calibrations of affective and emotional registers. With this line of thinking, the authors are able to gesture towards a new outline of the political.

This study deals essentially with the problem of how to assess the strength of certain global sceptical arguments, such as, the infinite regress argument. The thesis consists of a critical discussion of four prominent theories of knowledge in the current epistemological debate. The discussed theories are: Laurence Bon Jour's coherence theory of knowledge, Robert Nozick's tracking-the-truth theory, Barry Stroud's Cartesian theory of knowledge and Edward Craig's contextualism. The critical discussion results in a proposal of an alternative theory of knowledge named the Best-Available Method-theory. This theory has the advantage of not vitiating our ordinary intuitions regarding the concept of knowledge. The BAM theory also aims to explain the inclinations towards and against global sceptical challenges. It is stated that there are certain serious problems in challenging some of the sceptical philosopher's conclusions. Further, the BAM theory explains the attractions and the drawbacks of major, rival theories in the epistemological debate, such as foundationalism, coherentism and internalism, externalism. The upshot of the critical discussion could be seen as an ecumenical theory of knowledge.