Intellectual Assurance: Essays on Traditional Epistemic Internalism

by Brett Coppenger (Editor), Michael Bergmann (Editor)

Overview

This volume presents a dozen essays by prominent contemporary epistemologists providing a careful examination and critical evaluation of traditional epistemic internalism. Unlike competing versions of internalism, the guiding principle of traditional internalism is not to accommodate our commonsense nonskeptical views about the rationality of our ordinary beliefs, but to emphasize the need for strong skepticism-resistant intellectual assurance that our ordinary beliefs (perceptual and otherwise) are true. The essays focus on what traditional internalism has to say about the following three topics: the nature of non-inferentially justified belief, the nature of inferentially justified belief, and the best way to respond to skepticism. The end product is a volume containing many probing objections to traditional internalism, pushing its proponents to provide creative new defenses if they want this old-fashioned view to survive in the modern world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191030345
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	02/25/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	600 KB

About the Author

Brett Coppenger is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tuskegee University. Michael Bergmann is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. In addition to numerous articles in epistemology and philosophy of religion in journals and edited volumes, he is author of Justification without Awareness (OUP 2006) and co-editor of Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (OUP 2011), Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief: Disagreement and Evolution (OUP 2014), and Reason and Faith: Themes from Swinburne (OUP 2016).

Table of Contents

Traditional Internalism: An Introduction, Brett Coppenger
Chapter Abstracts
I. Traditional Internalism and Non-Inferentially Justified Belief
Direct Acquaintance
1. Confrontation Foundationalism, Peter Markie
2. Acquaintance and Fallible Non-Inferential Justification, Chris Tucker
3. Foundational Justification, Meta-Justification, and Fumertonian Acquaintance, Matthias Steup
Perceptual Belief
4. Staying Indoors: How Phenomenal Dogmatism Solves the Skeptical Problem without Going Externalist, Berit Brogaard
5. Experience and Evidence Abridged, Susanna Schellenberg
II. Traditional Internalism and Inferentially Justified Belief
6. Principles of Inferential Justification, Trent Dougherty
7. Inferential Appearances, Michael Huemer
III. Traditional Internalism and Skepticism
Responding to the Skeptic
8. The Costs of Demon-Proof Justification, Sanford Goldberg
9. Acquaintance and Skepticism about the Past, Ted Poston
Skepticism and Circularity
10. On Metaepistemological Scepticism, Duncan Pritchard and Christopher Ranalli
11. How Our Knowledge Squares With Skeptical Intuitions Despite the Circle, Ernest Sosa
Afterword
12. The Prospects for Traditional Internalism, Richard Fumerton

Editorial Reviews

"this volume does indeed identify many of the serious challenges facing a successful traditional internalist theory, Fumerton's or otherwise. As such, it is an essential resource for anyone interested in these issues." — Sharon Mason, Philosophy in Review

From the Publisher