1 Knowledge and Justification This book is an investigation of one central problem which arises in the attempt to give a philosophical account of empirical ...

A comprehensive defence of the rationalist view that insight independent of experience is a genuine basis for knowledge.

One of the many problems that would have t o be solved by a satisfactory theory of empirical knowledge, perhaps the most central is a general structural problem which I shall call the epistemic regress problem: the problem of how to avoid an in- finite and presumably vicious regress of justification in ones account of the justifica- tion of empirical beliefs. Foundationalist theories of empirical knowledge, as we shall see further below, attempt t o avoid the regress by locating a (...) class of empirical beliefs whose justification does not depend on that of other empirical beliefs. Extemalist theories, the topic of the present paper, represent one species of foundationalism. (shrink)

Introduction -- Part I: The classical problems of epistemology -- Descartes's epistemology -- The concept of knowledge -- The problem of induction -- A priori justification and knowledge -- Immediate experience -- Knowledge of the external world -- Some further epistemological issues : other minds, testimony, and memory -- Part II: Contemporary responses to the cartesian epistemological program -- Introduction to part II -- Foundationalism and coherentism -- Internalism and externalism -- Quine and naturalized epistemology -- Knowledge and skepticism.

The clinical ethics literature is striking for the absence of an important genre of scholarship that is common to the literature of clinical medicine: systematic reviews. As a consequence, the field of clinical ethics lacks the internal, corrective effect of review articles that are designed to reduce potential bias. This article inaugurates a new section of the annual "Clinical Ethics" issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy on systematic reviews. Using recently articulated standards for argument-based normative ethics, we provide (...) a systematic review of the literature on concealed medication for the management of psychiatric disorders. Four steps are completed: identify a focused question; conduct a literature search using key terms relevant to the focused question; assess the adequacy of the argument-based methods of the papers identified; and identify conclusions drawn in each paper and whether they apply to the focused question. We identified seven papers and provide an assessment of them. While none of the papers fully meet the standards of argument-based ethics, they did provide rationales for the use of concealed medications, with the important requirement such a practice be accountable in explicit organizational policy to prevent abuse of patients with mental illness or dementia. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore the dispute between foundationalism and coherentism and attempt a resolution. I will begin by considering the origin of the issue in the famous epistemic regress problem. Next I will explore the central foundationalist idea and the most central objections that have been raised against foundationalist views. This will lead to a consideration of the main contours of the coherentist alternative, and eventually to a discussion of objections to coherentism – including several specific (...) ones that I now judge to be clearly fatal, especially when taken together. This will motivate, finally, a reconsideration of foundationalism. I will argue that the dialectically most serious objection to foundationalism can be successfully answered. While the answer that I will suggest admittedly carries with it the price of aggravating certain other difficulties, especially the venerable problem of showing how belief in an external world of physical objects can be justified, it still seems to me to leave foundationalism as by far the more defensible and promising of the two alternatives. (shrink)

Outlines a tenable version of a traditional foundationalist account\nof empirical justification and its implications for the justification\nof beliefs about physical or material objects. Presupposing the acceptability\nof other beliefs about physical objects; Concept of a basic belief;\nMetabeliefs about one's own occurrent beliefs; Beliefs about sensory\nexperience.

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism, phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naïve realism or direct realism. I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to (...) representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not—that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

The historically most central epistemological issue concerning perception, to which this article will be almost entirely devoted, is whether and how beliefs about physical objects and about the physical world generally can be justified or warranted on the basis of sensory or perceptual experience—where it is internalist justification, roughly having a reason to think that the belief in question is true, that is mainly in question (see the entry justification, epistemic: internalist vs. externalist conceptions of). This issue, commonly referred to (...) as “the problem of the external world,” divides into two closely related sub-issues, which correspond to the first two main sections below. The first of these issues has to do with the nature of sensory experience and its relation to the physical world; it is typically (though as we shall see not altogether perspicuously) formulated as the question of what are the immediate objects of awareness in sensory experience or, in a variant but essentially equivalent terminology, of what is given in such experience. Perhaps the most historically standard, though not currently the most popular answer to this question has been that it is sense-data (private, non-physical entities that actually have the immediately experienced sensory qualities) that are the immediate objects of awareness or that are given. The second issue has to do with the way in which beliefs about the physical world are justified on the basis of such sensory experience. If it is concluded that physical objects are not themselves given, the two main answers to this question are representationalism or indirect realism (the view that the immediate objects of experience represent or depict physical objects in a way that allows one to infer justifiably from such experience to the existence of the corresponding “external” objects) and phenomenalism (the view.. (shrink)

À partir des résultats d’une recherche qualitative et participative ayant impliqué des personnes qui vivent avec un problème de santé mentale, des intervenants et des gestionnaires de milieux de pratique en santé mentale et visant à explorer les représentations d’une intégration sociale jugée réussie, cet article propose une analyse et une réflexion sur les conditions de possibilité d’une société suffisamment bonne et inclusive pour les personnes vivant avec un problème de santé mentale. L’élargissement du prisme de la reconnaissance sociale s’est (...) dégagé comme une condition essentielle à cet égard qui, elle-même, implique certaines conditions, avec en particulier un travail de reconnaissance de la différence en tant que telle et la mise à distance d’une logique d’utilité. (shrink)

The first comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra--an important and difficult text and the only book Nietzsche ever wrote with characters, events, setting, and a plot. Laurence Lampert's chapter-by-chapter commentary on Nietzsche's magnum opus clarifies not only Zarathustra's narrative structure but also the development of Nietzsche's thinking as a whole. "An impressive piece of scholarship. Insofar as it solves the riddle of Zarathustra in an unprecedented fashion, this study serves as an invaluable resource for all serious students of (...) Nietzsche's philosophy. Lampert's persuasive and thorough interpretation is bound to spark a revival of interest in Zarathustra and raise the standards of Nietzsche scholarship in general."--Daniel W. Conway, Review of Metaphysics "A book of scholarship, filled with passion and concern for its text."--Tracy B. Strong, Review of Politics "This is the first genuine textual commentary on Zarathustra in English, and therewith a genuine reader's guide. It makes a significant and original contribution to its field."--Werner J. Dannhauser, Cornell University "This is a very valuable and carefully wrought study of a very complex and subtle poetic-philosophical work that provides access to Nietzsche's style of presenting his thought, as well as to his passionately affirmed values. Lampert's commentary and analysis of Zarathustra is so thorough and detailed... that it is the most useful English-language companion to Nietzsche's 'edifying' and intriguing work."--Choice Selected as one of Choice's outstanding academic books for 1988. (shrink)

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism, phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naïve realism or direct realism. I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to (...) representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not—that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Aristotelianism remained the dominant influence on the course of natural philosophy taught at the University of Paris until the 1690s, when it was swiftly replaced by Cartesianism. The change was not one wanted by church or state and it can only be understood by developments within the wider University. On the one hand, the opening of a new college, the Collège de Mazarin, provided an environment in which the mechanical philosophy could flourish. On the other, divisions within the French Catholic (...) Church between Austinians and Molinists led to Cartesianism finding support within an important section of the faculty of theology, which was the traditional guardian of philosophical orthodoxy. The conversion of the University of Paris to Cartesianism had important consequences. It encouraged similar changes to the natural philosophical curriculum throughout France and affected the structure and raison d'être of the Académie des Sciences. (shrink)

_The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss_ takes on the crucial task of separating what is truly important in the work of Leo Strauss from the ephemeral politics associated with his school. Laurence Lampert focuses on exotericism: the use of artful rhetoric to simultaneously communicate a socially responsible message to the public at large and a more radical message of philosophic truth to a smaller, more intellectually inclined audience. Largely forgotten after the Enlightenment, exotericism, he shows, deeply informed Strauss both (...) as a reader and as a philosophic writer—indeed, Lampert argues, Strauss learned from the finest practitioners of exoteric writing how to become one himself. Examining some of Strauss’s most important books and essays through this exoteric lens, Lampert reevaluates not only Strauss but the philosophers—from Plato to Halevi to Nietzsche—with whom Strauss most deeply engaged. Ultimately Lampert shows that Strauss’s famous distinction between ancient and modern thinkers is primarily rhetorical, one of the great examples of Strauss’s exoteric craft. Celebrating Strauss’s achievements while recognizing one main shortcoming—unlike Nietzsche, he failed to appreciate the ramifications of modern natural science for philosophy and its public presentation—Lampert illuminates Strauss as having even greater philosophic importance than we have thought before. (shrink)

The trajectory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought has long presented a difficulty for the study of his philosophy. How did the young Nietzsche—classicist and ardent advocate of Wagner’s cultural renewal—become the philosopher of Will to Power and the Eternal Return? With this book, Laurence Lampert answers that question. He does so through his trademark technique of close readings of key works in Nietzsche’s journey to philosophy: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Human All Too Human, (...) and “Sanctus Januarius,” the final book of the 1882 Gay Science. Relying partly on how Nietzsche himself characterized his books in his many autobiographical guides to the trajectory of his thought, Lampert sets each in the context of Nietzsche’s writings as a whole, and looks at how they individually treat the question of what a philosopher is. Indispensable to his conclusions are the workbooks in which Nietzsche first recorded his advances, especially the 1881 workbook which shows him gradually gaining insights into the two foundations of his mature thinking. The result is the most complete picture we’ve had yet of the philosopher’s development, one that gives us a Promethean Nietzsche, gaining knowledge even as he was expanding his thought to create new worlds. (shrink)

La science du bien et du mal n'a jamais existé, et si Platon s'en désolait, nous avons cessé, nous, les Modernes, de nous en offusquer. Et pourtant, des questions d'ordre éthique nous sont incessamment posées aujourd'hui, ni plus ni moins que par le passé: quelles valeurs morales devons-nous promouvoir à l'école? Est-il acceptable d'abandonner à leur sort les familles de migrants fuyant la guerre? Notre pays, la France, doit-il intervenir militairement contre tel ou tel État dit "terroriste"?, etc. Face à (...) de telles interrogations, nous ne pouvons nous contenter de suspendre notre jugement sous couvert de relativisme ("À chacun sa conception du bien et du mal"). Prenant appui sur les réflexions de grands philosophes et théologiens face au défi du mal, tout en interrogeant la montée de nouvelles formes de violences au XXIe siècle, Laurence Hansen-Love pose la question: le bien et le mal sont-ils vraiment des notions obsolètes? Une fois récusée la fausse évidence d'une symétrie entre le bien et le mal, il est possible de prendre acte de la préséance du mal sur le bien. Dès lors, la certitude du mal, posée comme un fait, cesse de contredire l'incertitude du bien, à laquelle il apparaît sage de se résoudre."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

La planète est exténuée. L'humanité dans son ensemble traverse une mauvaise passe. A tel point que certains chercheurs professent l'effondrement, voire la fin de notre civilisation. Ces lanceurs d'alerte cosmique ne sont pas de simples illuminés. Ils comptent parmi eux des intellectuels de renom et des savants influents. Dans le même état d'esprit, des ingénieurs futuristes, anticipant une évolution qu'ils jugent inéluctable, programment le remplacement de notre espèce par des créatures hybrides d'un nouveau genre, humains augmentés ou améliorés. Demain, assurent-ils, (...) la "Singularité" assurera la relève du genre humain. L'ère du posthumanisme serait déjà entamée. Faut-il s'en féliciter? Laurence Hansen-Love expose ici les tenants et les aboutissants d'un débat qui nous concerne tous et dont les enjeux sont vertigineux. (shrink)

Summary The article discusses the decline of Aristotelian physics at the University of Paris in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A course of physics remained essentially Aristotelian until the final decade of the seventeenth century, when it came under the influence of Descartes. But the history of physics teaching over this period cannot be properly appreciated if it is simply seen in terms of the replacement of one physical philosophy by another. Long before the 1690s, the traditional Aristotelianism of (...) the Schools had been forced to come to terms with the New Science to some degree, while the Cartesianism of the early eighteenth century was always alive to the challenges to Descartes's particular physical theories. Except in the early seventeenth century the physics course at Paris was always in a state of change. The replacement of Aristotelian by Cartesian physics too involved the development of a novel epistemology. Although both Aristotelian and Cartesian professors believed that natural philosophy was a science of causes based upon a priori principles, the latter had a far more probabilist conception of physics. (shrink)

The article traces the changes that occurred in the teaching of theoretical medicine at the University of Paris in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the Faculty came under the influence of new medical ideas and discoveries. As a result it is essentially a study in the history of the transmission of ideas; the article illustrates how quickly and in what form these new ideas and discoveries became part of the common medical inheritance of one region of Europe. At (...) Paris, it is shown, the Faculty of Medicine was completely under the influence of the theories of Galen and Hippocrates at the beginning of the period, and rival ideas were greeted with hostility for much of the seventeenth century. By the early eighteenth century, however, the Faculty was completely abreast of contemporary developments and no longer wedded to a particular ‘school’. This change, it is emphasised, was associated with and closely influenced by, the growth of a more humble and discerning attitude among the Faculty's doctors with regards to the limits and the objectivity of their medical knowledge. The article is largely based on a hitherto unused source: the collection of abstracts of theses sustained in the period, to be found in the present-day Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médecine at Paris. (shrink)

This essay provide an overview of debates about the method of political philosophy that have recently gripped the field, focusing on the relationship of theory to practice. These debates can be usefully organized using two oppositions that together carve the field into three broad families of views. Call “practicalism” the view that the theory of justice exists to guide political action. Call “utopianism” the view that reflection on the idea of a just society plays an important role in the theory (...) of justice. Call the view that combines the two positions, “utopian practicalism”. On this view, reflection on the nature of a just society has an important role to play in guiding action. There would appear to be two ways to depart from this position: by rejecting the view's utopianism or its practicalism. So we find in the literature three broad camps: utopian practicalists, anti‐utopians, and anti‐practicalists. This essay provide an opinionated overview the ongoing debates between these three broad positions. It touches on the recent cases against practicalism by G.A. Cohen and David Estlund, the comparativist methodologies advocated by anti‐utopians such as Amartya Sen and Gerry Gaus, and systems failure approaches of Elizabeth Anderson and David Wiens. It also considers the recent development of novel utopian practicalist perspectives in the work of theorists including Erik Wright, Tommie Shelby, Lea Ypi, Pablo Gilabert, and Ben Laurence. (shrink)

Grice introduced generalized conversational implicatures with the following example: "Anyone who uses a sentence of the formX is meeting tz woman this evening would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X’s wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend" (1975 : 37). Concerning this example, he suggested the following account: When someone, by using the form of expression an JQ implicates that the X does not belong to or is not otherwise closely connected (...) with some identifiable person, the implicature is present because the speaker has failed to be specific in a way in which he might have been expected to be specific. (Grice 1975: 38.) Grice went on to sketch an explanation as to why such an implicature should arise, involving the different ways in which we behave towards things that are closely related to.. (shrink)

Face à sa finitude, l'homme est désemparé. Il aborde l'existence par la question du " pourquoi ". " Pourquoi m'a-t-on donné la vie si c'est pour la reprendre? " Il est envahi par la colère, la révolte... puis, il cherche un sens à sa mort et pose un au-delà salvateur, un lieu où tout peut continuer autrement... ou encore il envisage une réincarnation; bref, quelque chose qui n'est plus " la fin de la fin ". Mais quand l'homme se fait (...) philosophe, comment appréhende-t-il cette idée qui sera aussi sa réalité ultime? (shrink)

Perhaps the most pervasive conviction within the Western epistemological tradition is that in order for a belief to constitute knowledge it is necessary that it be epistemically justified: that the person in question have a reason or warrant which makes it at least highly likely that the belief is true. Historically, most epistemologists have distinguished two main sources from which such justification might arise. It has seemed obvious to all but a very few that many beliefs are justified by appeal (...) to one’s experience of the world. But it has seemed equally obvious to most that there are other beliefs, including many of the most important ones that we have, which are justified in a way which is entirely independent of any appeal to such experience, justified, as it is usually put, a priori, by reason or pure thought alone. (shrink)