Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Justification

  • Philosophical Questions and their Answers

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ It seems that many – most? – philosophers think that what philosophy is about is arriving at true positions on subjects ranging from morality, to knowledge, to reality, and the like. They think there is a determinate answer as to whether moral realism or anti-realism is true or whether the […]

  • Standards

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Both religion and philosophy endeavor to provide us with objective standards for our moral and aesthetic and other judgments, as well as our actions. Religion does it by stipulating a supreme authority in the person of God, while philosophy does it by appeal to reason and rationality, the authority of […]

  • From Passion to Belief

    by Daniel Tippens David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher and empiricist, did not believe that there are any self-evident truths (beyond the trivial “relations of ideas”), nor did he believe that reason is what makes us confident in our beliefs. For him, all knowledge is acquired and justified by experience — observation of the […]

  • Course Notes: Three Lectures on Knowledge

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ As readers of Course Notes will know, I created an entirely new Introduction to Philosophy course this year. Profound changes in the student population over the last several years, including an apparent inability to understand or even just read classics from the history of philosophy, as well as a troubling […]

  • Belief and Knowledge Reconsidered

    E. John Winner How did we ever come to use such an expression as “I believe . . . “?  Did we at some time become aware of a phenomenon (of belief)?  Did we observe ourselves and other people and so discover belief? — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1) §1. Recently, while reading Section 10 […]