In recent years empiricism has come under attack. Some argue that the view is incoherent and conclude, on that basis, that some knowledge is a priori. Whatever the merits of such arguments against empiricism, they cannot be parlayed into an argument in support of the a priori unless the latter is not open to those arguments. My primary contention is that the a priori is open to the arguments offered against empiricism. Hence, they do not advance the case for the a priori. I go on to offer an alternative strategy. The leading idea is that, instead of arguing against empiricism, rationalists should marshal empirical support for their position.

It has been suggested, recently and not so recently, by a number of analytic epistemologists that reliabilist and externalist accounts of justification and knowledge are inadequate responses to the goals of traditional epistemology and other goals of inquiry. But philosophers of science decry reliabilism and externalism because they are connected to traditional, analytic epistemology, an outmoded and utopian form of inquiry. Clearly, both groups of critics cannot be right. I think both groups are guilty of conceptual confusions that, once clarified, should allow the naturalization project to stand forth in a rather attractive light.

Sensory qualities are objective properties; indeed, on the evidence, they are physical properties. However, what makes a physical property the sensory quality it is is its relationship to sensory experiences of perceivers. For instance, the redness of a surface is a physical property of the surface; what makes that physical property surface red is the fact that it disposes surfaces to look red to appropriate visual perceivers in appropriate viewing circumstances. What it is like for something to look red—that is, the actual phenomenal character of visual experiences as of something red—is also a physical property; on the evidence, it is a physical property of the brain.

Resistance to contextualism comes in the form of many very different types of objections. My topic here is a certain group or family of related objections to contextualism that I call “Now you know it, now you don’t” objections. I responded to some such objections in my “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” a few years back. In what follows here, I will expand on that earlier response in various ways, and, in doing so, I will discuss some aspects of David Lewis’s recent paper, “Elusive Knowledge.”

Epistemology needs a social branch to complement its traditional, ‘individualist’ branch. Like its individualist sister, social epistemology would be an evaluative enterprise. It would assess (actual and possible) social practices in terms of their propensities to promote or inhibit knowledge, where knowledge is understood in the sense of true belief. Social epistemology should examine the practices of many types of players, as well as technological and institutional structures: speakers, hearers, gate-keepers of communication (e.g., editors, publishers, referees), communication technologies and their applications, and legal and economic arrangements that influence the epistemic quality of public speech. A mixture of analytical tools should be employed to assess practices in terms of their likely knowledge outcomes, tools that include Bayesian probability theory, economic theory, and empirical inquiry.

For the classical Greek philosophers, the cultivation of human rationality is a central ingredient of education andedification. But notions of reason and rationality have received various interpretations. A plurality of interpretations directs our attention to the general philosophical queries, What is rationality? and Why should we be rational? In this paper, I consider only briefly the first question by distinguishing three aspects of rationality in Section 2. Then I shall use, in Section 3, these three notions to give nine reformulations of the puzzling question ‘Is it rational to be rational?’. My main task is concerned with the analysis of the relevant questions, not in their answers. I hope this approach helps us to understand in a clearer way the nature and importance of human rationality.

With few exceptions, philosophers typically have contended that knowledge worthy of the name is beyond time and place. This venerable idea was turned on its head in the emergence of a rival view of knowledge as historical in the wake of the French Revolution. A claim that knowledge is not ahistorical but historical resolves some of these difficulties while creating others. This paper will briefly consider several of these difficulties, including how to argue for this position, the differences between contextualism, or a view of knowledge as cultural, and historicism, as well as issues concerning relativism and cognitive objectivity. It will argue that after the decline of foundationalism, a conception of knowledge as historical is our most promising approach.

The various forms of human knowledge can be regarded as an integral, historically developing system. Universal cultural categories are a system-building factor. They form the core of the cultural and historical code by which a type of society is reproduced. The differences in the meaning of universals in traditional and technogenic cultures determine the difference in the organization of knowledge forms. The modern system of knowledge is developing under two general conditions: the search for a new worldview, as well as the intensification of cross-cultural dialogue. The transition to the technological mastery of complex, historically evolving systems forms new images of nature from the scientific perspective, as well as new strategies of activity. These new images of nature accord not only with the values of the European culture, but correlate with the worldviews of different Eastern cultures which had previously been rejected as unscientific.

I review a familiar skeptical argument from Hume, and conclude that it requires us to accept that there is no necessary relation between beliefs about the world and their evidential grounds; that is, there is no logical or quasi-logical relation between empirical beliefs and their grounds, such that their grounds entail them, or even make them probable. I then argue that generic reliabilism can accommodate this fact about evidential grounds in a non-skeptical way. According to reliabilism, the grounds for our beliefs constitute good evidence so long as they are contingently reliable. Next I argue that agent reliabilism successfully addresses two related problems for other versions of reliabilism: the fact that beliefs can be reliably formed by accident, and the need for subjective justification. Finally, I explain why agent reliabilism is properly conceived as a version of virtue epistemology.

Appeal to the idea of an epistemic virtue promises insight into our practices of epistemic evaluation through employing a distinctive view of the ways in which we formulate and respond to reasons. Traits of ‘epistemic character’ guide our reasoning and reflection, and can be responsible for various forms of irrationality. One component of such a view is that emotions, sentiments and other affective states are far more central to questions of epistemic rationality than is commonly supposed. This paper explains why this is so, and then illustrates the value of this way of looking at the matter by considering two particular examples: the role of states of doubt in regulating our deliberations and inquiries; and the character of our response to some distinctive kinds of irrationality. This will involve a brief discussion of some forms of epistemic akrasia.