PHIL 228 - Epistemology

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, justification, and rationality. The theories we will study in this course will be understood as responses to increasingly radical skeptical arguments. We will begin with the problem of induction, which claims that we can never justifiably infer generalizations from particular cases, infer beliefs about the future from ones about the past, and infer from observable patterns to unobservable explanations. We will uncover various paradoxes about such inferences, and attempt to respond to them. We will then look at skeptical arguments that we do not know anything on the basis of sense perception, and the various theories of knowledge and justification that are built in response to such arguments. Of particular interest will be the Gettier problem, externalism versus internalism about knowledge and justification, foundationalism versus coherentism about justification, and contextualism. Mr. Lam.