Philosophy TV – cool website

Do you know the Philosophy TV website? It is very cool and interesting – they have lots of videos with professional philosophers talking about recent topics on contemporary philosophy, e.g., deviant logic,moral realism, the problem of causation, epistemological disagreement, etc. Each topic is discussed by a pair of philosophers

To watch the videos, click here. You also can download the mp3/mp4 files as podcasts, and hear it on your mobile player. Isn’t it cool to hear these philosophers talking while you’re on the bus or walking through the street?

Anthony Brueckner at PUCRS

Professor Anthony Brueckner will come to Porto Alegre this week. He is professor of philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara, and his work in epistemology is well-known to us. If you’re willing to enter into the fight with skepticism, Brueckner’s papers are highly recommended to you. His book, “Essays on Skepticism”, has just been published by Oxford University Press.

From June 07 to June 10, Anthony Brueckner will be giving a course at PUCRS for graduate students of philosophy. The subject matter of the course is epistemic bootstrapping, epistemic circularity, knowledge of reliability and self-support. And here is the syllabus:

This course will explore a nest of intensely debated issues in contemporary epistemology. 

Bootstrapping is a form of reasoning that a correct theory of justification should not sanction. Bootstrapping is a form of reasoning which would generate “easy knowledge” of the reliability of a belief source that comes without any investigation at all of the source. Questions: What exactly is bootstrapping? Does reliabilism sanction it? Does evidentialist foundationalism sanction it as well? How can a theory of justification avoid commitment to the possibility of bootstrapping?

Epistemic Circularity is a form of circularity that attaches to track-record arguments aimed at establishing the reliability of a belief source (knowledge of the conclusion of such an argument seems to be required for knowledge of its premises). Questions: Is EC unacceptable? How is it related to the reasoning involved in a bootstrapping argument? Can EC be avoided in establishing the reliability of a belief source? 

Is it true that in order to gain first-order knowledge from a putative knowledge-source (say, color vision) one must first know that the source is reliable? If so, how is one to come to gain such higher-order knowledge of reliability? The problem is made especially difficult if one subscribes to the No Self-Support principle according to which one cannot establish the reliability of a putative knowledge-source by using that very source.

First Seminar: “Vogel’s formulation and analysis of the problem of reliabilist bootstrapping”

Second Seminar: “Fumerton on epistemic circularity and track-record Arguments; Cohen on the extension of the problem of bootstrapping to internalist epistemologies, knowledge of reliability, and No Self-Support”

Third Seminar: “Cohen’s coherentist response; Van Cleve’s dilemma—-either embrace bootstrapping or be a skeptic”

Fourth Seminar: “Vogel’s defense of internalism against the accusation of bootstrapping”

READINGS

Jonathan Vogel, “Reliabilism leveled”, Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000)

Hilary Kornblith, “A reliabilist solution to the problem of promiscuous bootstrapping”, Analysis 69 (2009)

Stewart Cohen, “Basic knowledge and the problem of easy knowledge”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002)

Richard Fumerton, selection from Metaepistemology and skepticism (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995)

James Van Cleve, “Is knowledge easy—-or impossible? Externalism as the only alternative to skepticism”, in The Skeptics: contemporary essays, ed. Steven Luper (Ashgate, 2003)

Jonathan Vogel, “Epistemic bootstrapping”, Journal of Philosophy 105 (2008)

BACKGROUND READINGS

Alvin Goldman, “What is justified belief?”, in Justification and Knowledge, ed. George

Pappas (Reidel, 1979)

Alvin Goldman, “Reliabilism” entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Anthony Brueckner, “Unfair to Nozick”, Analysis 51 (1991)

Michael Titelbaum, “Tell me you love me: bootstrapping, externalism, and No-Lose Epistemology”, Philosophical Studies 149 (2010)

Stewart Cohen, “Bootstrapping, defeasible reasoning, and a priori justification”, Philosophical Perspectives 24 (2010)