Theory of Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 337-404
Author(s):  
Paul Rusnock ◽  
Jan Šebestík

This chapter presents Bolzano’s theory of knowledge, focusing on the account given in Book 3 of the Theory of Science. It begins with an introduction situating Bolzano in the historical context of modern philosophy and highlighting some of the most innovative features of his epistemology. There follows a section laying out the elements of Bolzano’s account of human knowledge: the nature of subjective ideas and propositions, their relations to their objective counterparts, intuitions and concepts, inference, immediate judgments, a priori and empirical knowledge. It then discusses his notions of knowledge, error, and certainty, followed by a consideration of §303 of the Theory of Science, where Bolzano describes how we might come to form some of our most basic judgments of experience. A final section discusses Bolzano’s critical stance towards the Kantian philosophy. (133 words)

Author(s):  
Rodion V. Savinov ◽  

The Article is devoted to the Representative of the Early Neo-Scholasticism, Span­ish Thinker Jaume Balmes. The Focus of Attention is the Interpretation of the Kan­tian Doctrine of Knowledge, which Balmes proposed in the Fourth Book of his “Filosofia Fundamental”(1846). It is shown that contrary to the generally negative attitude towards Kant and the Philosophy of Criticism that prevailed by the 1830s in Catholic Intellectual Culture, Balmes not only seriously studies and evaluates the Results of Kantian Criticism, but also he finds many points of contact between Criticism and Scholasticism, for which he undertakes a large-scale rewriting of the Kantian Theory of Knowledge in Terms of Scholasticism. At the same time, he of­fers Criticism of Kantian philosophy based on the Resources of the Scholastic Tra­dition, which allows integrating the Transcendental Analysis of Cognition devel­oped by Kant into the Methods of Scholastic Philosophy. Balmes sought to restore the Possibility of Metaphysical Knowledge, as a Result of which he excluded a number of Important Points of the Kantian Concept, he changed idea of a priori, setting the Boundaries of Sensuality and Reason, to a moving and dynamic “Agent Intellect” (entendimento agente), and Balmes replaced a transcendental subject by a “Universal Reason” (razón universal). In Conclusion, it is shown that Balmes’ Interpretation had a profound Influence on the Development of Understanding of Kantian Philosophy in Neo-Scholasticism and Neo-Thomism.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Jesus Martinez del Castillo

<p>A theory of knowledge is the explanation of things in terms of the possibilities and capabilities of the human way of knowing. The human knowledge is the representation of the things apprehended sensitively either through the senses or intuition. A theory of knowledge concludes about the reality of the things studied. As such it is <em>a priori</em> speculation, based on synthetic <em>a priori</em> statements. Its conclusions constitute interpretation, that is, hermeneutics. Linguistics as the science studying real language, that is, the language spoken, reverts to human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language thus must be studied as a theory of knowledge.</p><p>This article deals with the study of language as the human activity of speaking, saying and knowing. It analyzes the possibilities of a scientific theory, its characteristics and pre-requisites to see if language can be studied. The fact of language reverting to the individual speaking subject makes linguists to consider the peculiarities of language study as a human science. Since human subjects are free, creative and absolute, human facts cannot be but interpreted. This article concludes about the character of linguistics and the key points it must study and be based on.</p>


Author(s):  
A. V. Sokolov

The problem of scholarly knowledge strata is one of the key subjects in modern philosophy of science and epistemology (theory of knowledge). The threelevel model is the most popular in the document sphere as a sociocultural domain; it comprises empirical, theoretical and philosophical scientific knowledge. The author describes collision and contradictions between theoretical documentology and the empirical disciplines of document studies and book studies. He appraises achievements of empirical knowledge in the documentosphere and compares theoretical and methodological ways of three types: informational, conventional and medialogical ones. The author is skeptical about the following statement: the concept of document is relative, conventional and conditional in its essence. The author examines “The Strategy for Librarianship in the Russian Federation for the Period up to the Year 2030”. He insists that the Strategy has to be supported by the scientific strategy aimed to promote each level of empirical, theoretical and philosophical knowledge. He is also concerned about lacking philosophical level in document studies. The wisdom of philosophy lies in its comprising both rational and irrational sides of objects being studied. With document rational and irrational attributes in view, he offers the philosophical definition of document: document is the statement of humanness within social environment and historical time. This definition comprises anthropological and national variations of homo sapiens and philosophical concept of humanness as the unity of the opposite universal principles – the material and ideal.


Author(s):  
Barry Stroud

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Mormann

Abstract The main thesis of this paper is that Pap’s The Functional A Priori in Physical Theory and Cassirer’s Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics may be conceived as two kindred accounts of a late Neo-Kantian philosophy of science. They elucidate and clarify each other mutually by elaborating conceptual possibilities and pointing out affinities of neo-Kantian ideas with other currents of 20th century’s philosophy of science, namely, pragmatism, conventionalism, and logical empiricism. Taking into account these facts, it seems not too far fetched to conjecture that under more favorable circumstances Pap could have served as a mediator between the “analytic” and “continental” tradition thereby overcoming the dogmatic dualism of these two philosophical currents that has characterized philosophy in the second half the 20th century.


1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Casullo

Empiricist theories of knowledge are attractive for they offer the prospect of a unitary theory of knowledge based on relatively well understood physiological and cognitive processes. Mathematical knowledge, however, has been a traditional stumbling block for such theories. There are three primary features of mathematical knowledge which have led epistemologists to the conclusion that it cannot be accommodated within an empiricist framework: 1) mathematical propositions appear to be immune from empirical disconfirmation; 2) mathematical propositions appear to be known with certainty; and 3) mathematical propositions are necessary. Epistemologists who believe that some nonmathematical propositions, such as logical or ethical propositions, cannot be known a posteriori also typically appeal to the three factors cited above in defending their position. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine whether any of these alleged features of mathematical propositions establishes that knowledge of such propositions cannot be a posteriori.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (9999) ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Stanisław Czerniak ◽  

This article aims to reconstruct Max Scheler’s conception of three types of knowledge, outlined in his late work Philosophical Perspectives (1928). Scheler distinguished three kinds of knowledge: empirical, used to exercise control over nature, eidetic (essential) and metaphysical. The author reviews the epistemological criteria that underlie this distinction, and its functionalistic assumptions. In the article’s polemic part he accuses Scheler of a) crypto-dualism in his theory of knowledge, which draws insufficient distinctions between metaphysical and eidetic knowledge; b) totally omitting the status of the humanities in his classification of knowledge types; c) consistently developing a philosophy of knowledge without resort to the research tools offered by the philosophy of science, which takes such analyses out of their social and historical context (i.e. how knowledge is created in today’s scientific communities).


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-120
Author(s):  
Sotiris Mitralexis ◽  
Georgios Steiris

We are most thankful to Forum Philosophicum, and its Editor-in-Chief Marcin Podbielski, for the invitation to act as guest editors in a special issue dedicated to looking at Maximus the Confessor from a philosophical perspective—by which we mean both the philosophical efflorescence of Maximus’ thought per se, approached within its historical context, and the attempt to find Maximian solutions to contemporary philosophical problems or to engage Maximus’ thought in dialogue with modern philosophy. In many ways, this special issue is a sister volume to the book Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher (Eugene: Cascade / Wipf & Stock, forthcoming later in 2016). Both form parts of a sustained attempt at highlighting Maximus the Confessor’s relevance for philosophical inquiry, without denying the explicitly theological nature of his thought in doing so. Believing that there is much philosophical fecundity in this approach, we remain with the hope that it will be continued.


1985 ◽  
Vol 17 (51) ◽  
pp. 71-96
Author(s):  
Javier Echeverría

One of the main deficiencies of the twentieth century philosophy of science, in spite of evident achievements in the logical analysis and reconstruction of scientific theories, is the separation between formal sciences and those sciences with empirical contents. This distinction derives from Carnap and it was generally admitted by the Vienna Circle since the publication of “Formalwissenschaft und Realwissenschaft” in Erkenntnis in 1935. Later philosophy of science, in spite of other criticism of the neopositivist programme, has maintained this separation. It can be claimed that Realwissenschaften, physics in particular, have determined the development of later philosophy of science. Analyses of scientific theories most of the time refer to physical theories, and occasionally to biological ones. There is still a lot to be done in the field of mathematics and logic, in order to analyse and reconstruct their theories. But even if this task is undertaken, and some progress has been done lately, there is still a lot of work to do before a general theory of science can be proposed which transcends such a division between formal and empirical sciences, let alone the human or social sciences. This paper is intended as a contribution to supersede the first dichotomy between formal and physical sciences. One of the main problems in order to make some progress along these lines is that since its origins logical positivism had a deficient theory of knowledge, and the same happened with analytical philosophy developed immediately afterwards. This paper thus criticises examples of such a type of theory of knowledge, as expressed in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and Russell’s Philosophy of Logical Atomism. The core argument is as follows: these theorizations are inadequate for scientific knowledge; this type of knowledge, particularly the notion of ‘sign’ cannot be adapted to the simple scheme proposed in those works. The criticism here undertaken is developed from a rationalist point of view, in a sense which is closer to Leibniz and Saussure, than to recent philosophers fascinated with the word ‘reason’. Some new proposals are put forward, necessarily provisional, which justify the term, which in turn could be perfectly substituted by another, of Semiology of Science.


Polylogos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (№ 4 (18)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Mikhail Loktionov

Considering the philosophical heritage of Alexander Bogdanov, the author focuses on the aspect of the theory of knowledge, which passes through all the work of the famous philosopher and revolutionary. Doubts about the possibility of an exhaustive knowledge of the surrounding reality are also visible in Bogdanov’s earliest works. An attempt to build a new approach to human knowledge, having rinked him with activity experience, was undertaken by him in his main philosophical work, “Empiriomonism”. Standing on the positions of positivism as a “scientific” philosophy, Bogdanov tried to substantiate the dynamics of the public process, while remaining at the Marxist platform. The further development of his ideas led to the creation of a “universal organizational science” – tectology, which, in his opinion, has already passed beyond philosophy and was not only science, but also methodology of knowledge, as well as the style of scientific thinking, to which science, initially not realizing this, always sought. Thus, studying the legacy of Bogdanov, we see the development of views on the ideas of knowledge in the Russian philosophy of the beginning of the XXth century.


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