The moral philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century, at least in the English-speaking part of the world, has been largely devoted to problems of an ontological or epistemological nature. This concentration of effort by many acute analytical minds has not produced any general agreement with respect to the solution of these problems; it seems likely, on the contrary, that the wealth of proposed solutions, each making some claim to plausibility, has resulted in greater disagreement than ever before, (...) and in some cases disagreement about issues so fundamental that certain schools of thought now find it unrewarding, if not impossible, to communicate with one another. Moral philosophers of almost all schools seem to agree, however, that no major possibility has been neglected during this period, and that every proposed solution which can be adjudged at all plausible has been examined with considerable thoroughness. It is now common practice, for example, for the authors of books on moral philosophy to introduce their own theories by what purports to be a classification and review of all \emph{possible} solutions to the basic problems of analysis; and in many cases, indeed, the primary defense of the author's own position seems to consist in the negative argument that his own position cannot fail to be correct because none of the others which he has mentioned is satisfactory. (shrink)

Roderick Firth's writings on epistemology amount to an exceptionally careful and cogent defense of an account of perceptual knowledge in the tradition Firth called 'radical empiricism.' This important book collects all of Firth's major works on epistemology; it also contains his only publication in ethics, the extremely influential essay on 'Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer.' In addition, the book includes a number of important previously unpublished essays. Together, these writings constitute the most finished and compelling version of traditional empiricist (...) epistemology. This book will be of value to students and scholars of epistemology, phenomenalism, and ethics. (shrink)

Firth argues that austin's criticisms of the argument from illusion do not destroy the argument. We can reformulate it in two ways so that it succeeds as a method of ostensibly defining terms denoting the sensory constituent of perceptual experience. One way maintains the act-Object distinction of the cartesian tradition and the other uses the language of "looks." (staff).

2. Because of the possibility of lies, or the misuse of language, I believe that Professor Hempel's formulation of the problem of empirical certainty must be interpreted as a convenient abbreviation, in linguistic terms, of a question about beliefs. A complete formulation of the question would have to make some reference to the speaker's beliefs as he utters an "experiential statement.".

1. If Taylor's first two proposals are accepted, we must introduce a term to replace "know" in a familiar, but weaker, sense of the word. In ordinary speech it is correct to say that I know that p, even if my conviction that p might be somewhat increased by further evidence. In Taylor's stronger sense of "know" and "knowledge," it is doubtful that we have much, if any, knowledge. For even if we sometimes have evidence which is conclusive, and which (...) therefore might be said to "justify" complete conviction, it can still be doubted that in such cases we are as fully convinced as we could be. (shrink)

Sellars discusses a wide variety of philosophical problems in his Carus Lectures, and everything he has to say about those problems deserves very careful attention. But it seems appropriate for me to confine my remarks to his first lecture, which he calls “The Lever of Archimedes.” He pays me the compliment of taking as a starting point for this lecture a paper of mine, “Coherence, Certainty, and Epistemic Priority,” published by The Journal of Philosophy in 1964. Although the paper deals (...) with very general conceptual and epistemological issues, its orientation is influenced by the fact that it was written for a memorial symposium on the philosophy of C. I. Lewis. (shrink)