Kornblith and His Critics (eBook)

Joshua Dipaolo, Luis R.G. Oliveira (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
658 Seiten
Wiley-Blackwell (Verlag)
978-1-394-24797-4 (ISBN)

Infos

A wide-ranging engagement with one of contemporary epistemology's most influential thinkers

Hilary Kornblith is one of the world's leading philosophers theorizing about knowledge and related issues. A key figure in the naturalized epistemology tradition, Kornblith integrates traditional empiricism with contemporary cognitive science, rejecting inward-looking, first-person approaches in favor of a third-person, scientifically grounded perspective on mind and knowledge.

Kornblith's contributions have reshaped debates about the nature and structure of knowledge, justification, and epistemic normativity; he has challenged the legitimacy of conceptual analysis and the reliability of reflection and reasoning, besides charting and defending a mature and self-consciously naturalistic philosophical methodology. By exploring this terrain, Kornblith and His Critics offers an in-depth examination of some of the most unique and innovative work in the last 40 years of anglophone epistemology.

This volume brings together fifteen original essays by leading philosophers engaging with Kornblith's work, each written specifically for this collection. Organized into three main thematic sections - Knowledge and Justification, Reflection and Inference, and Naturalism and Methodology - the collection systematically traces and tests the implications of Kornblith's work across key debates. The volume also includes a substantial reply from Kornblith, offering his own response to the critical challenges raised by the incisive contributions.

Kornblith and His Critics is ideal for graduate and advanced undergraduate philosophy students, especially those taking a variety of courses on epistemology and philosophical methodology. Key features include:

• A complete and detailed overview of how Kornblith's work compares with, and contributes to, key debates in epistemology.
• Cutting-edge engagement with the foundations, nature, and future of naturalized epistemology.
• Thorough discussion of core issues in epistemology: from the nature of knowledge, justification, and inference to the epistemic value of reflection and conceptual analysis.
• A lengthy and unique reply by Hilary Kornblith, directly addressing the critical challenges raised by the incisive contributions.
• A systematic and thematic structure for easy integration into graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses.

Kornblith and His Critics is a vital resource for researchers and instructors within philosophy programs in both MA and PhD curricula, as well as general readers interested in post-analytic and empirically-informed philosophy.

Joshua DiPaolo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University Fullerton. He specializes in ethics and epistemology, with research focused on epistemic dependence, extremism, and evidential standards. His work has appeared in Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Philosophical Studies, and Synthese.

Luis R.G. Oliveira is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. His areas of expertise include epistemic normativity and the philosophy of religion. He is the editor or co-editor of Common Sense Metaphysics, Propositional and Doxastic Justification, and Externalism About Knowledge.

Textauszug

Notes on Contributors

David Christensen is Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He previously taught at the University of Vermont for 20 years, most of them as Hilary Kornblith's colleague. He works in epistemology, both informal and formal (or at least business casual).

Juan Comesaña is a professor at Rutgers University.

Catherine Z. Elgin is Professor of the Philosophy of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is an epistemologist who focuses on the nature and scope of understanding. She argues that understanding is holistic—that is, understanding is in the first instance a grasp of interconnected networks of epistemic commitments, rather than a grasp of individual propositions. Rather than being or aspiring to be a mirror of nature, understanding is a matter of providing resources for epistemic agents to foster their cognitive objectives. Understanding then is agential. Models, idealizations, and fictions are among the resources agents deploy. Such devices are felicitous falsehoods. Although strictly false, they are felicitous in that they embody and advance understanding of the subject matters they bear on. Thus according to her epistemology then the arts as well as the sciences are vehicles of understanding. Elgin is the author of Epistemic Ecology (2025), True Enough (2017), Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary (1997), Considered Judgment (1996), With Reference to Reference (1983), and co‐author with Nelson Goodman of Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (1988).

Georgi Gardiner is an associate professor of Philosophy and GESS (Gender and Sexuality Studies) at Tulane University. Before that, she was faculty at the University of Tennessee, and held fellowships at Oxford University, the Denbo Center for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Gardiner specializes in epistemology, social philosophy, and meta‐philosophy. This includes research in evidence law, legal proof, rape accusations, self‐deception, doubt, attention, virtue epistemology, epistemic value, and the ethics of belief. Gardiner also works on the philosophy of sex, love, relationships, circus, risk, tarot, and the occult. Gardiner is fascinated by how people gather and how innovative gatherings can help individuals and communities flourish. She thus develops interactive, playful philosophy activities, artworks, and workshops to help people be philosophically creative, and she writes on the resulting ‘philosophy through art, play, and adventure’.

Daniel Greco is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. His research focuses primarily on epistemology, where he has written extensively on skepticism, the relationship between first‐ and higher‐order epistemic states, and the structure of epistemic norms. He is the author of Idealization in Epistemology: A Modest Modeling Approach (Oxford University Press, 2023), which defends the use of formal models—drawing on tools from economics and decision theory—as central to epistemological inquiry. Greco's work has appeared in leading philosophy journals, including Mind, The Philosophical Review, Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and The Journal of Philosophy. His article “Significance Testing in Theory and Practice” received the Sir Karl Popper Prize, and his “Iteration and Fragmentation” won the Young Epistemologist Prize. He is currently Epistemology Section Editor for Philosophy Compass and for Ergo, and has served as a referee for numerous journals, presses, and granting agencies across philosophy and adjacent disciplines. Greco earned his PhD from MIT, his MPhil from Cambridge, and his AB from Princeton. Before joining Yale's faculty, he was a Bersoff Fellow at New York University (NYU). At Yale, he has played an active role in both graduate and undergraduate education, including Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy, and has taught courses ranging from epistemology and philosophy of science to philosophical issues in AI, as well as being a regular instructor in Yale's directed studies program.

Hilary Kornblith is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Inductive Inference and its Natural Ground (1993); Knowledge and its Place in Nature (2002); On Reflection (2012); A Naturalistic Epistemology: Selected Papers (2014); Second Thoughts and the Epistemological Enterprise (2019); and  Scientific Epistemology: An Introduction (2021).

Martin Kusch is Professor for Philosophy of Science and Epistemology at the University of Vienna. He retires at the end of the year. His main interests are in philosophy of the social sciences, history of German philosophy since Hegel, social epistemology and the sociology of scientific knowledge.

Tricia Magalotti is a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at Stockholm University. She received her PhD from the Institut Jean Nicod. She works on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind with a focus on the epistemology of emotions. She is particularly interested in how non‐doxastic mental states, such as emotions, can be epistemically justified and can provide epistemic justification for beliefs. She is also interested in epistemic value, especially that of emotions.

Anna‐Sara Malmgren (Anna‐Sara Quedens Malmgren) is Professor of Philosophy, and Head of the Philosophy Research Group, at University of Inland Norway (Lillehammer campus). She received her BA from Kings College London, her BPhil from Magdalen College Oxford, and her PhD from New York University. She then worked as an assistant professor of Philosophy at University of Texas Austin and Stanford University, before finally returning to Scandinavia (she is originally from Sweden). Malmgren specializes in epistemology and philosophy of mind (including philosophy of psychology and cognitive science), with particular focus on foundational questions concerning justification and explanation. Her broader philosophical research interests include topics in action theory, metaphysics, philosophy of language and logic, social epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy. She has published articles on topics in the epistemology of testimony, philosophical methodology, the theory of justification and action theory, and she has a monograph on the distinction between inferential and non‐inferential justification under way.

Berislav Marušić is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Epistemology at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at Brandeis University. His research interests are in moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, as well as in existentialism and the history of late modern philosophy. He is author of Evidence and Agency: Norms of Belief for Promising and Resolving (Oxford University Press, 2015) and On the Temporality of Emotions: An Essay on Grief, Anger, and Love (Oxford University Press, 2022), as well as co‐editor, with Mark Schroeder, of Analytic Existentialism (Oxford University Press, 2024), and, with Kyla Ebels‐Duggan, of Stephen J. White, Responsibility and the Demands of Morality: Collected Papers (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Matthew McGrath is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO.

Robin McKenna is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool and a senior research associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg. He has published on various topics in epistemology, including contextualism, epistemic norms, feminist epistemology, genealogy, listening, persuasion, pluralism, political epistemology, relativism, skepticism, and social construction. He has also dabbled in ethics, the philosophy of language, political philosophy, and the philosophy of science. In 2023 he published his first book, Non‐Ideal Epistemology, with Oxford University Press.

Tristram McPherson is a professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. They work on questions about the nature and substance of evaluation, and the methodology of answering such questions. Most of their work contributes to debates in metaethics, normative and applied ethics, and conceptual ethics.

Jennifer Nagel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, specializing in epistemology and philosophy of cognitive science. Her recent work focuses on the role played by knowledge and belief in human interaction, especially conversational interaction, and the means by which we track these states in real time. She is the author of Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014), and a variety of articles and book chapters on topics including skepticism, metacognition, reasoning, artificial intelligence, and curiosity.

David Plunkett is a professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.

Mona Simion is Director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow, UK.

Ernest Sosa is a professor at Rutgers University, NJ.

Katia Vavova is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College. As an undergraduate there, she was fortunate to be able to take a bus to UMass, where she could take...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.10.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Philosophers and their Critics
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
• Schlagworte: Hilary Kornblith • Kornblith arguments • Kornblith cognitive science • Kornblith critical reception • Kornblith critiques • Kornblith debates • Kornblith epistemic justification • Kornblith naturalized epistemology • Kornblith philosophical methodology
• ISBN-10: 1-394-24797-4 / 1394247974
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-24797-4 / 9781394247974