Knowledge, Reason & Experience

The course will comprise a survey of historical and/or contemporary perspectives on a range of epistemological topics such as:

1.  the nature of reason (e.g., teleological, instrumental, or communicative conceptions);
2.  rationalist and empiricist approaches to knowledge, perception, and belief;
3.  different theories of epistemic justification (e.g., coherentism, foundationalism internalist and externalist, and virtue theory);
4.  different theories of truth (e.g., correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, and semantic);
5.  metaphysical, scientific, existential, phenomenological, religious, moral, personal, and other possible approaches to truth, knowledge, and belief;

6. skeptical issues such as the problem of the external world, the problem of other minds, and the problem of induction;

7. problems of testimony such as trust, trustworthiness, epistemologies of ignorance, and epistemic injustice;

8. specific authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Descartes, Locke, Bayle, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Peirce, James, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Tarski, Austin, Gettier, Dretske, Code, Mills, Fricker.