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Articles 1 - 16 of 16
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 …
Decolonizing Nationalism: Reading Nkrumah And Nyerere’S Pan-African Epistemology, Jesse Benjamin
Decolonizing Nationalism: Reading Nkrumah And Nyerere’S Pan-African Epistemology, Jesse Benjamin
Jesse Benjamin
Using the perspective of intellectual history, this essay explores the lives and philosophies of Julius K. Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah, heads of state in Tanzania and Ghana, respectively, as well as philosophers, activists, and Pan-African leaders throughout their lifetimes. The central focus is on their concepts and practices of nationalism, and their attempts to transcend the confines of colonial, Western epistemologies in formulating new African social practices. Their concepts of African socialism, pan-Africanism, and neo-colonialism are examined closely. Their lived experiences with injustice in Africa and the Black Atlantic shaped their perspectives. Their unfinished work bequeathed to us tools for …
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 …
Dretske On Knowledge Closure, Steven Luper
The Knower, Inside And Out, Steven Luper
The Knower, Inside And Out, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
Adherents of the epistemological position called internalism typically believe that the view they oppose, called externalism, is such a new and radical departure from the established way of seeing knowledge that its implications are uninteresting. Perhaps itis relatively novel, but the approach to knowledge with the greatest antiquity is the one that equates it withcertainty, and while this conception is amenable to the demands of the internalist, it is also a non-starter in the opinion of almost all contemporary epistemologists since obviously it directly implies that we know nothing about the world. Perhaps skepticism is correct, but there are conceptions …
Epistemic Relativism, Steven Luper
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.
Doxastic Skepticism, Steven Luper
Doxastic Skepticism, Steven Luper
Steven Luper
In “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” Donald Davidson offers a n attempt to refute skepticism, a n attempt that is an expansion of the dense argument in part 1 of “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics” for the claim that “massive error about the world is simply unintelligible.”’ To help in his attack, he presses into service tightly interrelated theories about belief and meaning. In particular, he relies on the claim that ideal interpreters, who are fully informed and charitable, must attribute t o a speaker what are by their lights largely true beliefs. I argue that this …
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.