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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Persimals, Steven Luper
Persimals, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
What sort of thing, fundamentally, are you and I? For convenience, I use the term persimal to refer to the kind of thing we are, whatever that kind turns out to be. Accordingly, the question is, what are persimals? One possible answer is that persimalhood consists in being a human animal, but many theorists, including Derek Parfit and Jeff McMahan, not to mention John Locke, reject this idea in favor of a radically different view, according to which persimalhood consists in having certain sorts of mental or psychological features. In this essay, I try to show that the animalist approach …
Women, The Novel, And Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727, Karen Gevirtz
Women, The Novel, And Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727, Karen Gevirtz
Karen Bloom Gevirtz
Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727 shows how early women novelists drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre and literary omniscience as a point of view. These writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Davys used, tested, explored, accepted, and rejected ideas about the self in their works to represent the act of knowing and what it means to be a knowing self. Karen Bloom Gevirtz agues that as they did so, they developed structures for representing authoritative knowing that contributed to the development …
Restorative Rigging And The Safe Indication Account, Steven Luper
Restorative Rigging And The Safe Indication Account, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
Typical Gettieresque scenarios involve a subject, S, using a method, M, of believing something, p, where, normally, M is a reliable indicator of the truth of p, yet, in S’s circumstances, M is not reliable: M is deleteriously rigged. A different sort of scenario involves rigging that restores the reliability of a method M that is deleteriously rigged: M is restoratively rigged. Some theorists criticize (among others) the safe indication account of knowledge defended by Luper, Sosa, and Williamson on the grounds that it treats such cases as knowledge. But other theorists also criticize the safe indication account because it …
Epistemic Closure Principle, Steven Luper
What Skeptics Don't Know Refutes Them, Steven Luper
What Skeptics Don't Know Refutes Them, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
No abstract provided.
Indiscernability Skepticism, Steven Luper
The Easy Argument, Steven Luper
The Easy Argument, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
Suppose Ted is in an ordinary house in good viewing conditions and believes red, his table is red, entirely because he sees his table and its color; he also believes not-white, it is false that his table is white and illuminated by a red light, because not-white is entailed by red. The following three claims about this table case clash, but each seems plausible: 1. Ted’s epistemic position is strong enough for him to know red. 2. Ted cannot know not-white on the basis of red. 3. The epistemic closure principle, suitably restricted, is true. Stewart Cohen has called this …
The Reliabilist Theory Of Rational Belief, Steven Luper
The Reliabilist Theory Of Rational Belief, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
No abstract provided.
False Negatives, Steven Luper
False Negatives, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
In Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick suggested that knowing that some proposition, p, is true is a matter of being “sensitive” to p’s truth-value. It requires that one’s belief state concerning p vary appropriately with the truth-value of p as the latter shifts in relevant possible worlds. Nozick fleshed out this sketchy view with a specific analysis of what sensitivity entails. Famously, he drew upon this analysis in order to explain how common-sense knowledge claims, such as my claim to know I have hands, are true, even though we do not know that skeptical hypotheses are false. His explanation hinged on …
Belief And Rationality, Curtis Brown, Steven Luper
Naturalized Epistemology, Curtis Brown, Steven Luper
Naturalized Epistemology, Curtis Brown, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
No abstract provided.
How The Conception Of Knowledge Influences Our Educational Practices: Toward A Philosophical Understanding Of Epistemology In Education, James Magrini
How The Conception Of Knowledge Influences Our Educational Practices: Toward A Philosophical Understanding Of Epistemology In Education, James Magrini
James M Magrini
This paper explores how the conception and valuation of the knowledge within our educational practices determines the planning, writing, and implementation of the curriculum. There is a pressing need for educators to philosophically and systematically understand the relationship between the foundational epistemological beliefs that ground a curriculum and its relationship to forming the notions of competency, pedagogy, and the methods for evaluating and assessing student progress. These issues are not only relevant, but crucial when attempting to justify a particular conception of education, which relates directly to the student's potential for intellectual growth and social development. It may be argued …