Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam. They present their new book, Vice Epistemology , which was published by Routledge five days ago. Ian Kidd Study of the human epistemic failings has been a staple theme of philosophy since antiquity. Ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophers were all concerned with ignorance, stupidity, and prejudiced and biased ways of thinking – ones opposed to such high-fidelity philosophical goods as wisdom, certain knowledge, or rationality. Attempted amelioration of those epistemic failings has been an aim of ethics, logic, and the more overtly ‘therapeutic’ forms of philosophical practice, too. Obviously, our world remains populated by human beings with very many epistemic failings, a glum fact reiterated by contemporary research in empirical psychology, philosophy of mind and epistemology. Such work offers a whole range of conceptual tools for the study of those failings and one of the newest is that of an epistemic ...

Jon Robson I am a teaching associate at the University of Nottingham. I work on the epistemology of aesthetic, ethical, and religious judgements (and also on videogames). I hereby assert that God exists and that I am in the fortunate position of knowing this to be the case. Of course I am aware that these assertions are likely to prove ever so slightly controversial (indeed Anna Ichino 's previous post raises some insightful and thought-provoking worries about whether I am even correct in thinking that I believe these things) but let’s assume for the time being that they are correct. Furthermore, let’s suppose that you don’t share this knowledge. What, then, can I do to bring you to a position where you too know that God exists? One obvious suggestion is that I provide you with some cogent argument demonstrating God’s existence. Debates concerning the epistemic status of theistic belief have traditionally centred around the evidential value of such arguments with numerous ...