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Righting epistemology : Hume's revolution / Bredo Johnsen.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Johnsen, Bredo, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Hume, David, 1711-1776.
- Hume, David.
- Knowledge, Theory of.
- Skepticism.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (xi, 303 pages)
- Other Title:
- Hume's revolution
- Place of Publication:
- New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2017.
- Summary:
- David Hume launched a historic revolution in epistemology, but allies appeared only in the twentieth century, in the persons of Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman, and W. V. Quine. Hume’s second great contribution to the field was to propose reflective equilibrium theory as the framework within which to understand epistemic justification. The core of this book comprises an account of these developments from Hume to Quine, and an extension of reflective equilibrium theory that renders it a general theory of epistemic justification concerning our beliefs about the world. In chapters on Sextus, Descartes, Wittgenstein, and various aspects of Hume’s epistemology, the author defends new readings of those philosophers’ writings on skepticism and notes significant relationships among their views. Finally, in appendices on Hilary Putnam’s “Brains in a Vat” and Fred Dretske’s contextualism, the author shows that both fail to rule out the possible truth of radical skeptical hypotheses. This is not surprising, since those hypotheses are in fact possible. They do not, however, have any epistemological significance, since epistemic justification is a function of the extent to which our bodies of beliefs are in reflective equilibrium, and no extant conception of knowledge is of any epistemological interest.
- Contents:
- Sextus Empiricus
- Descartes
- Radical external world skepticism
- Humean radical external world skepticism
- Hume
- Mainstream epistemology
- Popper
- Goodman
- Epistemology naturalized
- Quine
- Reflective equilibrium
- Wittgenstein
- Brains in a vat
- Dretske.
- Notes:
- Previously issued in print: 2017.
- Includes bibliographical references.
- Description based on print version record.
- ISBN:
- 0-19-066279-4
- 0-19-066280-8
- 0-19-066278-6
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