This landmark collection of essays by six renowned philosophers explores the implications of the contentious realism/antirealism debate for epistemology. The essays examine issues such as whether epistemology needs to be realist, the bearing of a realist conception of truth on epistemology, and realism and antirealism in terms of a pragmatist conception of epistemic justification. Richard Rorty's essay provides a critical commentary on the other five.

Theories of causation may imply that your birth causes your death, which seems odd in the way that it is not odd to say that your birth precedes your death. Theories of knowledge may imply that the object of knowledge is the same as the object of belief, although we know but do not believe facts and we can know a proposition without knowing whether it is true.

This article is a response to Martin Orensanz’s argument that object-oriented ontology ought to accept the existence of matter as both a sensual and a real object. That matter can exist as a sensual object is a point immediately granted, since “sensual object” is such a broad term that nothing could be excluded from this designation. Yet I argue that this is not the case with respect to real objects, which must exist independently of any other entity that might encounter (...) them. This leads to a related debate on whether parthood is transitive, in which Orensanz takes up a recent argument of Daniel Korman while I defend the modified Aristotelian position that only the proximate parts of an object can be said to belong to it in the strict sense. (shrink)

IT IS NO LONGER UNUSUAL to find ethical or moral relativism defended, yet there remains some uneasiness about the position, even among its defenders. Richard Brandt, for example, who offers a version he finds "somewhat plausible," admits that he and most other philosophers "have an anti-relativist predilection, at least when we come to moral issues which are important.".

Gilbert Harman, in a well-known thought experiment, evokes the intuition that moral value can be perceptually seen. However, Harman dismisses the intuition, contending that moral concepts and judgments are the products of agent psychology and do not map onto mind-independent objects. Robert Audi, attempting to account for moral perception himself, fails to meet Harman’s challenge since his own ontological commitments do not allow for objects that moral concepts can map onto. This paper will offer an alternate theory (...) of moral perception that maps moral concepts onto mind-independent entities, thereby meeting Harman’s challenge. To accomplish this, I offer that moral properties are not supervenient but are relational properties which possess their own non-reducible phenomenology. (shrink)

Cet article est une réponse à l’argument de Martin Orensanz selon lequel l’ontologie orientée objet devrait accepter l’existence de la matière en tant qu’objet à la fois sensuel et réel. Que la matière puisse exister en tant qu’objet sensuel, nous l’admettons d’emblée puisque « objet sensuel » est un terme si large que rien ne peut être exclu de cette dénomination. Ce n’est pourtant pas le cas, selon moi, des objets réels, qui doivent exister indépendamment de toute autre entité sus-ceptible (...) de les rencontrer. Cela conduit à un débat sur le caractère transitif de la relation partie à tout, dans lequel Orensanz reprend un argument récent de Daniel Korman, tandis que je défends une position aristotélicienne amendée selon la-quelle seules les parties proximales d’un objet peuvent être considérées comme appartenant à cet objet au sens strict du terme. (shrink)