Paul Moser's book defends what has been an unfashionable view in recent epistemology: the foundationalist account of knowledge and justification. Since the time of Plato philosophers have wondered what exactly knowledge is. This book develops a new account of perceptual knowledge which specifies the exact sense in which knowledge has foundations. The author argues that experiential foundations are indeed essential to perceptual knowledge, and he explains what knowledge requires beyond justified true beliefs. In challenging prominent sceptical claims that we (...) have no justified beliefs about the external world, the book outlines a theory of rational belief. (shrink)

In this book, Paul K. Moser proposes a new approach to inquiry about God, including a new discipline of the ethics for inquiry about God. It is an ethics for human attitudes and relationships as well as actions in inquiry, and it includes human responsibility for seeking evidence that involves a moral priority for humans. Such ethics includes an ongoing test, a trial, for human receptivity to goodness, including morally good relationships, as a priority in human inquiry and life. (...) Moser also defends an approach to the evidence for God that makes sense of the elusiveness and occasional absence of God in human experience. His book will be of interest to those interested in inquiry about God, with special relevance to scholars and advanced students in religious studies, philosophy, theology, and biblical studies. (shrink)

SINGLE MAGNETIC NORTHPOLES AND SOUTPOLESAND THEIR IMPORTANCE FOR SCIENCETen lectures delivered at the University of Viennaduring the summer semester of 1947byDr. Felix EhrenhaftU. S. Visiting Profe...

Contains nineteen newly commissioned articles by top philosophers on various aspects of the theory of knowledge. The articles survey the field as well as make original contributions to contemporary debates.

This anthology is intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, economics, and political science. It includes twenty-one selections falling under three main categories: individual decision theory; game theory and group decision-making; reasons, desires and intentionality. All the pieces have been published before in journals and have proven long term importance to theoretical work in rational action. The volume includes a general introduction on decision theory and a topical bibliography.

Philosophers have traditionally sought objective knowledge: knowledge of things whose existence does not depend on one's conceiving of them. Philosophy After Objectivity uses lessons from debates over objective knowledge to characterize the kinds of reasons pertinent to philosophical and other theoretical views. It argues that we cannot meet skeptics' typical demands for non-question begging support for claims to objective truth, and that, therefore, we should not regard our supporting reasons as resistant to skeptical challenges.

Our expectations for human experience of God can obscure the reality and the presence of such experience for us. They can lead us to look in the wrong places for God’s presence, and they can lead us not to look at all. This article counters the threat of misleading expectations regarding God, while acknowledging a role for diving hiding from humans on occasion. It contends that, given God’s perfect moral character, we should expect typical human experience of God to have (...) moral dissonance, that is, experiential conflict in morally relevant ways. We shall see the evidential or cognitive importance of how humans respond to such dissonance. Our failing to respond cooperatively with God can result either in our obscuring evidence of divine reality or in God’s hiding divine self-manifestation for redemptive purposes aimed at our benefit. (shrink)

This book explores the role of divine severity in the character and wisdom of God, and the flux and difficulties of human life in relation to divine salvation. Much has been written on problems of evil, but the matter of divine severity has received relatively little attention. Paul K. Moser discusses the function of philosophy, evidence and miracles in approaching God. He argues that if God's aim is to extend without coercion His lasting life to humans, then commitment to (...) that goal could manifest itself in making human life severe, for the sake of encouraging humans to enter into that cooperative good life. In this scenario, divine agapē is conferred as free gift, but the human reception of it includes stress and struggle in the face of conflicting powers and priorities. Moser's work will be of great interest to students of the philosophy of religion, and theology. (shrink)

Diversity and disagreement in the religious beliefs among many religious people seem here to stay, however much they bother some inquirers. Even so, the latter inquirers appear not to be similarly bothered by diversity and disagreement in the scientific beliefs among many scientists. They sometimes propose that we should take religious beliefs to be noncognitive and perhaps even nonontological and noncausal regarding their apparent referents, but they do not propose the same for scientific beliefs. Perhaps they would account for this (...) difference in terms of more extensive diversity and disagreement among religious beliefs than scientific beliefs. We shall attend to the alleged significance of diversity and disagreement among religious beliefs, with an eye toward its bearing on epistemic and ontological matters in religion. In particular, we shall ask whether the significance recommends a retreat from first-order to “second-order” religion, as suggested by Branden Thornhill-Miller and Peter Millican. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics ed. by David NewheiserPaul K. MoserThe Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics. Edited by David Newheiser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 216 pp. $32.50 paper; $99.00 hardcover.There are two general ways to approach a controversial topic. The first way defines the key terms for the topic as clearly as possible, in order to give contributors a (...) common focus. This manner of approach keeps participants on the same page, with a shared topic of conversation and debate. The second way does not bother to formulate shared definitions of key terms. Instead, it notes multiple uses of key terms in history, and it allows contributors to proceed with their preferred uses, despite considerable variation in uses.This book, emerging from a 2018 conference on religion and its critics, opts for the second way, leaving readers with a wide range of understandings of “atheism.” Its eight essays therefore often treat different topics, with little sense of a common query. Editor Newheiser looks for a common feature as follows: “These essays explore the complex relations of sympathy and resistance that connect particular atheisms with particular religious traditions” (2). He hopes that “the collection opens new possibilities for conversation between those who are religious and those who are not” (2).We naturally might ask what the hoped-for conversation is about. If it is about the truth of theism, we are faced with a potential belief about whether God exists. Many people are concerned about that matter, even if atheism includes components beyond a mere belief about God’s existence. Atheism, Newheiser proposes, “is a polyphonic assemblage that develops in conversation with religious traditions” (8). He also claims that the collection is helpful in “bracketing the timeworn debate over the existence of God” (9). Even if the debate is “timeworn,” it still could be vital to understanding many religious traditions, theistic and nontheistic. In addition, it could be central to an adequate understanding of atheism even if atheism includes many noncognitive features. Such important prospects deserve more attention than Newheiser and his contributors suggest.An Afterword by Constance M. Furey, “The Drama of Atheism,” tries to find some unity in the book’s essays. She reports that the contributors are “united in our interest in atheism’s diversity, and intrigued by the possibility that new studies of atheism might unravel the single thread linking religion to belief” (200). She adds that the book’s authors “collectively confirm that [End Page 94] atheism’s multifaceted drama has often been overshadowed by the huckster out front, luring passersby with a simple cry, ‘God! Alive or Dead? True or False?’” (201). I fail to see why the latter questions should be associated with a “huckster.” That seems to assign guilt by association, without needed good reasons.I cannot recall anyone, philosopher or theologian, arguing that historical atheists hold only that it is false that God exists. Interest in the issue of “True or False?” is prominent among philosophers and theologians, because they are interested in the nature of reality, with respect to the existence of a divine being. Such interests, however, are no threat to other areas of commitment and practice among atheists. Those other areas can get due attention while one maintains a keen interest in the question of God’s existence. I suggest, then, that the book has a misplaced emphasis in its (attempt at) jettisoning issues about the existence of God in connection with atheism. Such issues are central to historical atheism, even though other concerns and features accompany it.Furey looks for a special kind of “hope” in the collection’s essays. She cites the book’s editor in endorsing “a commitment to thoughtful life and living thought that holds ‘affirmation and negation together in tension,’... in ‘an ethical practice of openness to the unexpected’” (202). She exclaims: “What better place to find this hope, the holding of affirmation and negation together, than in a volume devoted to open inquiry and unexpected conclusions about atheism” (202). She does not say, however, what the praised “negation” consists in. Is this the negation of God’s existence... (shrink)

Essay Review: A Socialized History of Science: Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society, Science, Technology and the Military, Scientific Knowledge Socialized .

In discussions of medical decision making as it applies to people with disabilities, a major obstacle stands in the way: the perceptions and values of disabled people and of many nondisabled people, regarding virtually the whole range of current health and medical-ethical issues, seem frequently to conflict with one another. This divergence in part grows out of the sense, common among people with disabilities, that their interactions with “the helping professions,” medical and social service professionals, are adversarial. But those differences (...) of opinion also stem more basically from a clash of fundamental values.This paper addresses, in historical perspective, the ways in which the status of persons with disabilities as a stigmatized minority group affects medical decision making. It also examines the efforts of disability rights activists to prevent discrimination against persons with disabilities in current medical culture. Finally, it raises questions about how the rights of people with disabilities will fare as new care standards are developed and implemented. (shrink)

While early studies of populism, usually dated from the 1960s, were highly interdisciplinary, contemporary research in this field is dominated by political science and political theory. This current phase of research is narrowly focused on certain forms of political action and remarkably reluctant to pathologize the US case. Social theory plays at most a marginal role. Recent historicizations of this field have failed to recognize the significance of the prior ‘missing first phase’ of populism studies (1940–65) led by key sociological (...) figures among the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School. Social theorization was prominent then and US populism’s contingent vulnerability to demagogic exploitation was a major research focus. This article provides an immanent critical reconstruction of these thinkers’ key social-theoretical insights, building to a schematization of ‘modern demagogy’. (shrink)

Past, present, and future are reversed in the reader's encounter with the illustrations selected by Gertrude Stein for her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.1 After the table of contents there is a table of illustrations that encourages everyone to look at the pictures before they begin reading. During that initial examination, the illustrations forecast what is to be discovered in the text. Expectations are aroused by photographs showing Gertrude Stein in front of the atelier door, rooms hung with paintings, Gertrude (...) and Alice in front of Saint Mark's Cathedral, and both with a car in front of Joffre's birthplace. It is natural—although, as it turns out, not altogether correct—to assume that the accumulation of paintings will be explained, that the life lived within the rooms will be fully depicted, and that conventional narrative explanation will be provided to account for the presence of Gertrude and Alice together in such disparate settings as Venice and the French marshal's home. · 1. For useful comments on several pictures as well as evidence that "even the book's sixteen photographs were carefully placed in the first edition," see Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces , p. 219. Paul K. Alkon, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is author of Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Among his recent articles are "Boswellian Time" and "The Historical Development of the Concept of Time." He is writing a book about time in Defoe's fiction. See also: "The Mind, The Body, and Gertrude Stein" by Catharine R. Stimpson in Vol. 3, No. 3; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in Vol. 8, No. 3. (shrink)

This new edition provides an excellent overview of the field of epistemology. Revised sections on justification and knowledge and the Gettier Problem, and new sections on skepticism and naturalized epistemology, present the most important foundational and recent work in the theory of knowledge. Organized specifically with courses in mind, Empirical Knowledge is accessible to upper-level undergraduates and graduate students.

This is a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of contemporary work on moral relativism. The selections are divided topically under the following headings: General Issues Concerning Moral Relativism; Relativism and Moral Diversity; the Coherence of Moral Relativism; Defense and Criticism of Moral Relativism; and Relativism, Realism and Rationality. The volume includes a comprehensive topical bibliography and a large introduction with explanatory summaries of all the entries.

Contemporary Materialism brings together the best recent work on materialism from many of our leading contemporary philosophers. This is the first comprehensive reader on the subject. The majority of philosophers and scientists today hold the view that all phenomena are physical, as a result materialism or 'physicalism' is now the dominant ontology in a wide range of fields. Surprisingly no single book, until now, has collected the key investigations into materialism, to reflect the impact it has had on current thinking (...) in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and the theory of value. The classic papers in this collection chart contemporary problems, positions and themes in materialism. At the invitation of the editors, many of the papers have been specially up-dated for this collection: follow-on pieces written by the contributors enable them to appraise the original paper and assess developments since the work was first published. The book's selections are largely non-technical and accessible to advanced undergraduates. The editors have provided a useful general introduction, outlining and contextualising this central system of thought, as well as a topical bibliography. Contemporary Materialism will be vital reading for anyone concerned to discover the ideas underlying contemporary philosophy. David Armstrong, University of Sydney; Jerry Fodor, Rutgers University, New Jersey; Tim Crane, University College, London; D. H. Mellor, Univeristy of Cambridge; J.J.C. (shrink)

It is argued that a pure coherence theory of epistemic empirical justification fails to avoid an isolation objection according to which empirical justification has been divorced from one's total empirical evidence. Also, it is shown that several recent efforts to meet this objection either are outright failures or are irrelevant inasmuch as they diverge from epistemic coherentism. The overall moral is that we should look beyond coherentism for an adequate theory of epistemic empirical justification.

How can the Biblical God be the Lord and King who, being typically unseen and even self-veiled at times, authoritatively leads people for divine purposes? This article’s main thesis is that the answer is in divine moral leading via human moral experience of God (of a kind to be clarified). The Hebrew Bible speaks of God as ‘king,’ including for a time prior to the Jewish human monarchy. Ancient Judaism, as Martin Buber has observed, acknowledged direct and indirect forms of (...) divine rule and thus of theocracy. This article explores the importance of divine rule as divine direct leading, particularly in moral matters, without reliance on indirect theocracy supervised by humans. It thus considers a role for God as Über-King superior to any human king, maintaining a direct moral theocracy without a need for indirect theocracy. The divine goal, in this perspective, is a universal commonwealth in righteousness, while allowing for variation in political structure. The article identifies the importance in the Hebrew Bible of letting God be God as an Über-King who, although self-veiled at times, leads willing people directly and thereby rules over them uncoercively. It also clarifies a purpose for divine self-veiling neglected by Buber and many others, and it offers a morally sensitive test for unveiled authenticity in divine moral leading. (shrink)

From the ancient Greeks to the formative voices of contemporary analytic philosophy, this collection of readings deftly blends the foremost classical sources with important comtemporary philosophical thinkers to present a wide-ranging and in-depth examination of the major theories of knowledge.