Admission requirements
Admission to this course is restricted to first-year students enrolled in the BA programme Philosophy: Global and Comparative Perspectives.
Description
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the most important contemporary and ancient issues in epistemology. The basic concepts of epistemology, such as belief, truth, justification, perception, and knowledge, will be considered and will receive our philosophical scrutiny.
Classical and contemporary problems will be discussed concerning these basic concepts, including the Gettier Problem (for giving an analysis of knowledge), the Epistemic Regress Problem (for epistemic justification), the Problems of Illusion and Hallucination (for giving account to the nature of perception and for perceptual knowledge), the debate between internalists and externalists, problems with reliabilism, Hume's Problem of Induction, and two of the most powerful Radical Skeptical Arguments, namely the Problem from Certainty and the Problem from Ignorance.
We shall attempt to present these problems rigorously and clearly. And we shall explore solutions to these and other problems. We shall use an introductory textbook and primary texts to supplement the lectures and in-class discussions which will be our focus.
Course objectives
Students who successfully complete the course will have a good understanding of:
key concepts in epistemology;
and the most important classical and contemporary problems that have arisen within epistemology;
key general philosophical tools such as possible worlds, virtue theory, and counterfactual conditionals will also be used to deepen our engagement with the epistemological concepts, problems, and analyses.
Students who successfully complete the course will be able to:
explain, both in writing and orally, key concepts in epistemology in an intuitive and philosophically sophisticated way;
write a short essay on a topic within epistemology.
Timetable
The timetable is available on the BA Philosophy: Global and Comparative Perspectives website
Mode of instruction
Lectures and seminars (2 hrs per week)
Tutorials (2 hrs per week)
Class attendance is required for both lectures/seminars and tutorials.
Course Load
Total course load 5 EC x 28 hours = 140 hours
Attending lectures: 14 x 2 hours per week = 28 hours
Attending tutorials: 14 x 2 hours per week = 28 hours
Preparation lectures and/or seminars: 14 x 4 = 56 hours
Take home exam and writing paper: 28 hours
Assessment method
Weekly written assignments, presentations during tutorials, adequate attendance and participation (20% of the final mark)
Take home examination with tasks and essay questions for midterm (30% of the final mark)
Final paper of 2000 words (50% of the final mark)
Weighing
The final mark for the course is established by determining the weighted average of the two subtests.
Resit
The resit will be one take home exam consisting of several essay questions, covering the entirety of the course material. No separate resits will be offered for mid-term tests. The mark for the resit will replace all previously earned marks for subtests.
Satisfactory completion of practical assignments is a prerequisite for taking the resit.
Exam review
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.
Blackboard
Blackboard will be used for:
Announcements
Assignments
Readings
Essays
Reading list
Essential Testbook
- Duncan Pritchard (2014), What is this Thing Called Knowledge? (Routledge, 3rd ed.) (available in the bookstores)
Additional readings
Additional primary texts are available online [e.g. on JSTOR] or in bookstores and the library, and include:
Bertrand Russell, excerpts from The Problems of Philosophy; 'knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description', pp. 25-32.
Plato, extract from de Meno
E. Gettier (1963). ‘Is justified true belief knowledge?’ Analysis, 23, pp.121-123, also in Kim and Sosa (2000), pp. pp. 58-59.
L. Bonjour (1985/1999). “The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism”, in Greco and Sosa (1999), pp. 117-144.
A. Goldman (1979). “What is Justified Belief?”, in Kim and Sosa (eds.) (2000), pp. 340-353
M.G.F. Martin (1995). “Perception” in Grayling (ed.), pp. 26-43.A. J. Ayer (1936). Language, Truth, and Logic, Chapter 4.
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section 4
Descartes, Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, Meditation 1
P. K. Unger (1975). “An Argument for Scepticism” reprinted in Kim and Sosa (2000), pp. 42-52.
R. Nozick (1981). “Knowledge and Scepticism” in Kim and Sosa (2000), pp. 79-102.
Useful collections in which many of the above texts are found:
Sosa, E. & Kim, J. (eds.) (2000). Epistemology: An Anthology, (Oxford: Blackwell).
N. Lemos (2007). An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, (Cambridge, C.U.P.).
Greco, J. & Sosa, E. (eds.) (1999). The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell).
Grayling, A.C. (1995). Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject, (Oxford: O.U.P.)
Registration
Enrolment for courses and exams through uSis is mandatory.
Students are strongly advised to register in uSis through the activity number which can be found in the timetables for courses and exams.
Registration Studeren à la carte and Contractonderwijs
Not applicable.
Contact
Remarks
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