Dr. Deborah Heikes                                                                                   Office Hours: 
334 Morton Hall                                                                                                               & by appt.
824-2335                                                                                                   Email: heikesd at uah dot edu

Course Texts:
        Human Knowledge, Paul Moser and Arnold vander Nat, eds.  (Oxford)

Course Description and Goals:

        Epistemology is the area of philosophy that deals with knowledge: What is knowledge?  How do we know?  What do we know?  Can we know anything?  In this course, we will address each of these questions, both from an historical and contemporary perspective.
         In the first part of this course, we will consider historical theories of knowledge beginning with Plato’s notion of knowledge as justified true belief.  We will then consider both the empiricist and rationalist versions of foundationalism, as well as Quine’s reasons for rejecting foundationalism.
         In the second part of this course, we will more closely examine coherentism, the possibility of apriori knowledge, whether knowledge can be justified true belief, and what justifies a belief.  We will conclude by examining skeptical arguments concerning the possibility of knowledge.
         The goal of this course is to provide you with a broad understanding of the main debates in contemporary epistemology as well as the historical background for those debates.

Requirements:

 Bi-weekly essays (40%): Every other week, you will be required to write a 2-3 page critical essay
on the reading assignment for the coming week.  At the beginning of class, I will ask you to present your assessment of the reading, and we will use that as a basis for further class discussion.

 Paper Proposal (10%): a roughly 3-4 page proposal outlining on what topic you intend
to write, what questions you will address on that topic, and how you will approach answering those questions

 Paper (50%): a 12-15 page critical paper related to some aspect of the course (and
following through on the topic you submit in your paper proposal)
 

Course Outline: (dates for specific reading assignments will be announced in class)

History of Epistemology
Plato (c. 427-c.347 B.C.):  Theaetetus
David Hume (1711-1776):  An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804):  Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970):  Appearance, Reality, and Knowledge By Acquaintance
A.J. Ayer (1910-1989):  Verification and Philosophy
W.V. Quine (1908-2000):  Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Naturalized Epistemology
W.V. Quine:  Epistemology Naturalized
Hilary Putnam:  Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized
Louis M. Antony:  Quine as Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology

Apriori Knowledge
Roderick M. Chisholm:  The Truths of Reason
Saul A. Kripke:  A Priori Knowledge, Necessity, and Contingency
Clarence Irving Lewis:  A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori

Analysis of Knowledge
Edmund Gettier:  Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
John Pollock:  The Gettier Problem
Richard Feldman:  An Alleged Defect in Gettier Counter-Examples

Justified Belief
William P. Alston:  Concepts of Epistemic Justification
Ernest Sosa:  The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge
David B. Annis:   A Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification
Richard Feldman and Earl Conee:  Evidentialism
Stephen Stich:  Reflective Equilibrium, Analytic Epistemology, and the Problem of Cognitive Diversity

Skepticism (time permitting)
G. E. Moore:  Proof of an External World
Ludwig Wittgenstein:  Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness
P.F. Strawson:  Skepticism, Naturalism, and Transcendental Arguments
Barry Stroud:  Scepticism, 'Externalism', and the Goal of Epistemology