Epistemology

Catalog description

This course is designed to provide an introduction to the major issues in contemporary analytic epistemology. Though epistemology has a long history in philosophy, contemporary epistemology has brought the modern scientific worldview and psychological accounts of the mind to bear on articulating the nature and justification of knowledge and belief. Moreover, in the 20th century many philosophers began to investigate the social factors (including race and gender) and values on our understanding of knowledge. Among the topics we will examine are skepticism, epistemic contextualism, defining knowledge, foundationalism, and coherentism, epistemic externalism, naturalized epistemology, and feminist and social epistemology.