•  2004
    Understanding
    In D. Pritchard S. Berneker (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. 2011.
    This entry offers a critical overview of the contemporary literature on understanding, especially in epistemology and the philosophy of science.
  •  1297
    Epistemic Normativity
    In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 243-264. 2009.
    In this article, from the 2009 Oxford University Press collection Epistemic Value, I criticize existing accounts of epistemic normativity by Alston, Goldman, and Sosa, and then offer a new view.
  •  1291
    What It Takes to Live Philosophically: Or, How to Progress in the Art of Living
    with Caleb Cohoe
    Metaphilosophy 51 (2-3): 391-410. 2020.
    This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth‐directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition‐based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are correct. The essay arg…Read more
  •  1248
    On Intellectualism in Epistemology
    Mind 120 (479): 705-733. 2011.
    According to ‘orthodox’ epistemology, it has recently been said, whether or not a true belief amounts to knowledge depends exclusively on truth-related factors: for example, on whether the true belief was formed in a reliable way, or was supported by good evidence, and so on. Jason Stanley refers to this as the ‘intellectualist’ component of orthodox epistemology, and Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath describe it as orthodox epistemology’s commitment to a ‘purely epistemic’ account of knowledge —…Read more
  •  1123
    Wisdom
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 1-16. 2015.
    What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I argue that wisdom consists in knowledge of how to live well, and that this knowledge of how to live well is constituted by various further kinds of knowledge. One concern for this view is that knowledge is not needed for wisdom but rather some state short of knowledge, such as having rational or justified beliefs about various topics. Another concern is that the emphasis on knowing how to live well fails to do justice to the…Read more
  •  925
    Knowledge, Practical Interests, and Rising Tides
    In John Greco & David Henderson (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Point and Purpose in Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2015.
    Defenders of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology (or what I call practicalism) need to address two main problems. First, the view seems to imply, absurdly, that knowledge can come and go quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our variable practical interests. We can call this the stability problem. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem. I argue that both probl…Read more
  •  854
    Understanding as an Epistemic Goal
    Dissertation, University of Notre Dame. 2005.
    Among epistemologists and philosophers of science, one often hears that someone with understanding is able to “see” or “grasp” how the elements of a subject “cohere” or “fit together”—but just what is involved in the seeing or the grasping is usually left to the imagination. I argue that the most productive way to make progress on this issue is by first identifying the kind of explanation-seeking why-questions that drive the search for understanding in the first place. In particular, I suggest…Read more
  •  757
    In this paper I elucidate various ways in which understanding can be seen as an excellence of the mind or intellectual virtue. Along the way, I take up the neglected issue of what it might mean to be an “understanding person”—by which I mean not a person who understands a number of things about the natural world, but a person who steers clear of things like judgmentalism in her evaluation of other people, and thus is better able to take up different perspectives and view them with a sympathetic…Read more
  •  716
    Is understanding a species of knowledge?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (3): 515-535. 2006.
    Among philosophers of science there seems to be a general consensus that understanding represents a species of knowledge, but virtually every major epistemologist who has thought seriously about understanding has come to deny this claim. Against this prevailing tide in epistemology, I argue that understanding is, in fact, a species of knowledge: just like knowledge, for example, understanding is not transparent and can be Gettiered. I then consider how the psychological act of "grasping" that se…Read more
  •  676
    I explore the extent to which the epistemic state of understanding is transparent to the one who understands. Against several contemporary epistemologists, I argue that it is not transparent in the way that many have claimed, drawing on results from developmental psychology, animal cognition, and other fields.
  •  654
    What is philosophy as a way of life? Why philosophy as a way of life?
    European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 236-251. 2020.
    Despite a recent surge of interest in philosophy as a way of life, it is not clear what it might mean for philosophy to guide one's life, or how a “philosophical” way of life might differ from a life guided by religion, tradition, or some other source. We argue against John Cooper that spiritual exercises figure crucially in the idea of philosophy as a way of life—not just in the ancient world but also today, at least if the idea is to be viable. In order to make the case we attempt to clarify …Read more
  •  644
    Transmitting Understanding and Know-How
    In Stephen Hetherington & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology, Routledge. 2020.
    Among contemporary epistemologists and scholars of ancient philosophy, one often hears that transmitting propositional knowledge by testimony is usually easy and straightforward, but transmitting understanding and know-how by testimony is usually difficult or simply impossible. Further provocative conclusions are then sometimes drawn from these claims: for instance, that know-how and understanding are not types of propositional knowledge. In contrast, I argue that transmitting propositional kn…Read more
  •  629
    I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink’s project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact that bo…Read more
  •  532
    The Value of Understanding
    Philosophy Compass 7 (2): 103-117. 2012.
    Over the last several years a number of leading philosophers – including Catherine Elgin, Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Duncan Pritchard – have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the contemporary focus on knowledge in epistemology and have attempted to “recover” the notion of understanding. According to some of these philosophers, in fact, understanding deserves not just to be recovered, but to supplant knowledge as the focus of epistemological inquiry. This entry considers some of th…Read more
  •  513
    The Logic of Mysticism
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (2): 109--123. 2015.
    I argue that mystical experience essentially involves two aspects: an element of direct encounter with God, and an element of union with God. The framework I use to make sense of is taken largely from William Alston’s magisterial book Perceiving God. While I believe Alston’s view is correct in many essentials, the main problem with the account is that it divorces the idea of encountering or perceiving God from the idea of being united with God. What I argue, on the contrary, is that because our …Read more
  •  445
    The Value of Reflection
    In Miguel Ángel Fernández Vargas (ed.), Performance Epistemology: Foundations and Applications, Oxford University Press Uk. 2016.
  •  306
    Wisdom in Theology
    In William and Frederick Abraham and Aquino (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology, . forthcoming.
  •  293
    Epistemic Goals and Epistemic Values
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (3): 725-744. 2008.
    No
  •  236
    The goal of explanation
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (4): 337-344. 2010.
    I defend the claim that understanding is the goal of explanation against various persistent criticisms, especially the criticism that understanding is not truth-connected in the appropriate way, and hence is a merely psychological state. Part of the reason why understanding has been dismissed as the goal of explanation, I suggest, is because the psychological dimension of the goal of explanation has itself been almost entirely neglected. In turn, the psychological dimension of understanding—the …Read more
  •  219
    What Is Interesting?
    Logos and Episteme 2 (4): 515-542. 2011.
    In this paper I consider what it is that makes certain topics or questions epistemically interesting. Getting clear about this issue, I argue, is not only interesting in its own right, but also helps to shed light on increasingly important and perplexing questions in the epistemological literature: e.g., questions concerning how to think about ‘the epistemic point of view,’ as well as questions concerning what is most worthy of our intellectual attention and why.
  •  205
    Explanatory inquiry and the need for explanation
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (3): 481-497. 2008.
    Explanatory inquiry characteristically begins with a certain puzzlement about the world. But why do certain situations elicit our puzzlement while others leave us, in some epistemically relevant sense, cold? Moreover, what exactly is involved in the move from a state of puzzlement to a state where one's puzzlement is satisfied? In this paper I try to answer both of these questions. I also suggest ways in which our account of scientific rationality might benefit from having a better sense of the …Read more
  •  203
    What does it mean to understand something? What types of understanding can be distinguished? Is understanding always provided by explanations? And how is it related to knowledge? Such questions have attracted considerable interest in epistemology recently. These discussions, however, have not yet engaged insights about explanations and theories developed in philosophy of science. Conversely, philosophers of science have debated the nature of explanations and theories, while dismissing understand…Read more
  •  198
    Getting it right
    Philosophical Studies 166 (2): 329-347. 2013.
    Truth monism is the idea that only true beliefs are of fundamental epistemic value. The present paper considers three objections to truth monism, and argues that, while the truth monist has plausible responses to the first two objections, the third objection suggests that truth monism should be reformulated. On this reformulation, which we refer to as accuracy monism, the fundamental epistemic goal is accuracy, where accuracy is a matter of “getting it right.” The idea then developed is that acc…Read more
  •  176
    Ernest Sosa, knowledge, and understanding
    Philosophical Studies 106 (3): 171--191. 2001.
    This paper offers and analysis of Ernest Sosa's Virtue Perspectivism. Although Sosa has been credited with fathering the influential contemporary movement known as Virtue Epistemology, I argue that Sosa imprudently abandons the reliabilist-based insights of Virtue Epistemology in favor of a reflection-based, "perspectival"' view. Sosa's mixed allegiance to reliabilist-based and reflection-based views of knowledge, in fact, leads to an unwelcome tension in his thought which can be relieved by rec…Read more
  •  155
  •  137
    Cardinal Newman, Reformed Epistemologist?
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75 (4): 497-522. 2001.
    Despite the recent claims of some prominent Catholic philosophers, I argue that Cardinal Newman's writings are in fact largely compatible with the contemporary movement in the philosophy of religion known as Reformed Epistemology, and in particular with the work of Alvin Plantinga. I first show how the thought of both Newman and Plantinga was molded in response to the "evidentialist" claims of John Locke. I then examine the details of Newman's response, especially as seen in his Essay in Aid of …Read more
  •  100
    This collection offers original work on the nature of understanding by a range of distinguished philosophers. Although some of the essays are by scholars well known for their work on understanding, many of the essays bring entirely new figures to the discussion.
  •  83
    Review Essay on Jonathan Kvanvig’s The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2): 498-514. 2007.
  •  80
    Kant's argument for radical evil
    European Journal of Philosophy 10 (2). 2002.