Books

[bergie15]

Does anyone know of any good books on Epistemology? I've never read or really studied it before. Thanks!

[Immanuel Can]

Does anyone know of any good books on Epistemology? I've never read or really studied it before. Thanks!

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962).

[Impenitent]

Epistemology: an anthology Sosa and Kim

-Imp

[bergie15]

I will look these up. Thanks!

[odysseus]

bergie15, be careful of what you read, I would say. Analytic epistemology is, for the most part, massively boring and limited. It has none of the things that make the human condition interesting as there is that positivist strain in all they take up that insists of clarity to the point of omitting themes that have their actual content made exactly of what is not clear, and this is where philosophy gets interesting. They get lost in conformity. Instead, read the existentialists. These guys take the matter of "knowing" to its finality: the presence of presence. Husserl's Ideas is breakthrough. But beneath all these philosophers have to say, there is Kant. Analytic philosophy mostly ignores Kant, thinking that ship has sailed and sank. Robert Hanna has some works online and he is very right to say Kant was never really refuted, only ignored.

Not that Kant is right about all things, god forbid! But he opens the door pretty wide to allow for Hegel (errr...don't start here by any means), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche (these are anti Kantians, mostly, but that is what happens when the door is opened) and so on. epistemology gets sooooo interesting with Kant. Mind boggling, really, but you have to stick with it.

Continental epistemology! So what if it's hard.

[PeteJ]

bergie15, be careful of what you read, I would say. Analytic epistemology is, for the most part, massively boring and limited. It has none of the things that make the human condition interesting as there is that positivist strain in all they take up that insists of clarity to the point of omitting themes that have their actual content made exactly of what is not clear, and this is where philosophy gets interesting. They get lost in conformity. Instead, read the existentialists. These guys take the matter of "knowing" to its finality: the presence of presence. Husserl's Ideas is breakthrough. But beneath all these philosophers have to say, there is Kant. Analytic philosophy mostly ignores Kant, thinking that ship has sailed and sank. Robert Hanna has some works online and he is very right to say Kant was never really refuted, only ignored.

Not that Kant is right about all things, god forbid! But he opens the door pretty wide to allow for Hegel (errr...don't start here by any means), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche (these are anti Kantians, mostly, but that is what happens when the door is opened) and so on. epistemology gets sooooo interesting with Kant. Mind boggling, really, but you have to stick with it.

Continental epistemology! So what if it's hard.

Nice post. i sometimes think most modern philosophers have yet to catch up with Kant an Hegel. The 'presence of presence' or 'knowledge-by-identity' is the only real thing.

I believe Aristotle notes that true knowledge is identical with its object, but I can never find the quote.

[odysseus]

PeteJ wrote
Nice post. i sometimes think most modern philosophers have yet to catch up with Kant an Hegel. The 'presence of presence' or 'knowledge-by-identity' is the only real thing.

I believe Aristotle notes that true knowledge is identical with its object, but I can never find the quote.

The presence of presence is an extraordinary notion, but it takes one into a strange, intuitive no man's land, away from how humanity likes to think of itself. It is only a defensible concept, meaningful with a real basis in experience and/or argument, if one can actually put oneself in its apprehension, and this is very destructive to normalcy. to really get it, one becomes two: the usual, everyday self who is involved in the usual affairs, and a kind of secret self, where one sees that those affairs in all they are, are not reducible to other affairs just like them (science, for example). An "outside" to those affairs develops, which is more than merely critical; it is existential. Lev Shestov's All Things Are Possible touches rather lightly on this: philosophy should be an adventure, close and personal (close to Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety on this).

There is a line between sanity and insanity that is, in one's most insightful moments, crossed, a bit. It should be like this. It should be a risk, a giving up of something to see further. Analytic philosophers would never in their wildest imaginings conceive this to be true.

[Impenitent]

unless one inhabits the north pole where the presence of presents is made obvious by overabundant elves...

-Imp