After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions

Author: Pasnau, Robert
Title: After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions
Publication: New York: Oxford University Press, 2017

Description: Hardcover. 10" X 7". 384pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jacket. Bound in black cloth over boards with spine lettered in gilt. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is sound.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:

No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history, understood as a series of changing expectations about the cognitive ideal that beings such as us might hope to achieve in a world such as this. The story begins with Aristotle and then looks at how his epistemic program was developed through later antiquity and into the Middle Ages, before being dramatically reformulated in the seventeenth century. In watching these debates unfold over the centuries, one sees why epistemology has traditionally been embedded within a much larger sphere of concerns about human nature and the reality of the world we live in. It ultimately becomes clear why epistemology today has become a much narrower and specialized field, concerned with the conditions under which it is true to say, that someone knows something.

Based on a series of lectures given at Oxford University, Robert Pasnau's book ranges widely over the history of philosophy, and examines in some detail the rise of science as an autonomous discipline. Ultimately Pasnau argues that we may have no good reasons to suppose ourselves capable of achieving even the most minimal standards for knowledge, and the final chapter concludes with a discussion of faith and hope.(Publisher). Very Good / Very Good.

Seller ID: 15536

Subject: Philosophy & The History of Ideas, Science & Nature