Miloš Vuletić

What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F.

Margaret Cavendish and Joseph Glanvill disagreed over the reality of witchcraft. In her assessment of the exchange between the two, Jacqueline Broad finds that Cavendish was the "voice of scientific reason", not only because of her disbelief in witchcraft but also because her arguments show that Glanvill violated scientific principles to which he subscribed. This paper reassesses the disagreement and comes up with two conclusions. First, Glanvill's position is not as internally unstable as Broad's analysis suggests. Second, Cavendish can indeed be viewed as a voice of scientific reason, but in a different sense: she expresses the spirit of the seventeenthcentury natural philosophy insofar as she accepts precisely those elements of magical and occult traditions that did end up incorporated into science, and rejects those that were cast aside, witchcraft included.

The volume offers a lively and wide-ranging debate on the major questions of perceptual epistemology, including how perceptual experiences can bestow positive epistemic standing to empirical judgments and beliefs; the relative epistemic import of veridical and non-veridical perceptual experiences; the relation between experience and knowledge; and the nature of experience in view of its epistemic linkages to discursive contents. The volume is centered around five cutting-edge essays by leading authors in these areas—Anil Gupta, Andrea Kern, Christopher Peacocke, Susanna Schellenberg and Crispin Wright—along with no less than thirty contributions scrutinizing and critically discussing the essays, prompting detailed rejoinders from the lead authors. The volume closes with an extensive debate between Annalisa Coliva, Gupta and Wright. Taken as a whole, the volume covers much ground in epistemology of perception and displays a variety of approaches and perspectives through fruitful and accessible exchanges. It will be of interest not only to researchers working in perceptual epistemology but also to students new to the subject.

Contextualism and Relativism offer competing semantic accounts of personal taste predicates. I argue in this paper that Michael Glanzberg’s defense of contextualism from one relativist argument-the Lost Disagreement Argument-is not successful. I show that Glanzberg’s scalar analysis of the adjectives from which personal taste predicates are built fails to capture the characteristic subjectivity of these predicates. I propose an alternative analysis according to which each personal taste adjective denotes multiple functions from a set of objects to an ordered scale of measurement of the appropriate dimensional property. This analysis succeeds where Glanzberg’s fails and it favors a relativist treatment of personal taste predicates.

In the analysis of Anaxagoras’ physics in view of the relation between his teachings on multitude and heterogeneity, two central questions emerge: 1) How can the structure of the universe considered purely mereo-topologically help us explain that at the first cosmic stage no qualitative difference is manifest in spite of the fact that the entire qualitative heterogeneity is supposedly already present there? 2) How can heterogeneity become manifest at the second stage, resulting from the noûs intervention, if according to fragment B 6 such a possibility requires the existence of “the smallest”, while according to the general principle stated in fragment B 3 there is not “the smallest” but always only “a smaller”? This paper showcases the perplexity of these two questions but deals only with the former. The answer follows from Anaxagoras’ being a thoroughgoing infinitist in the way in which no Greek physicist was: the principle of space isotropy operative in geometry is extended to physics as well. So any two parts of the original mixture are similar to each other not only in view of the smaller-larger relation but also because each contains everything that the other one contains. This in effect means that at the stage of maximal possible heterogeneity each part of any part contains infinitely many heterogeneous parts of any kind whatsoever. So, neither can there be homogeneous parts in view of any qualitative property, nor can there be predominance in quantity of parts of any kind that would make some property manifest.