Epistemology

‘Epistemology’ argues that controlled psychedelic administration can have significant epistemic benefits consistent with a naturalistic worldview. The most obvious candidate for propositional knowledge, or knowledge that, is psychodynamic insight into one’s previously unknown mental states. This chapter argues that such insights are probably often accurate, but cannot be trusted uncritically: sober scrutiny is essential. It further argues that psychedelics offer knowledge by acquaintance with various aspects of the human mind, including its potential for diverse and beneficial modes of attention and cognition. At later times, subjects can re-evoke these beneficial modes. Therefore, psychedelics also make available ability knowledge, or knowledge how. The chapter argues that psychedelic experiences also facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge of old facts, allowing subjects to experience existing beliefs in more vivid and motivating ways. Finally, the chapter argues that psychedelic experiences can cause epistemic benefits indirectly, via their psychological benefits. In Lisa Bortolotti’s terminology, therapeutic psychedelic experiences are epistemically innocent.

An Epistemic Troika

In a characteristically stimulating and important paper, ‘Episteme’, Myles Burnyeat discusses what he calls the epistemic troika, which consists of knowledge by acquaintance, knowledge that, and knowledge how. He argues that the troika ‘lacks universal validity’; he ‘suspects’ that it is the product of Anglophone philosophy in the 1950s-early 1970s. He also challenges the philosophical value of the troika. In my paper, I explore the troika, both in its own right and as a guide to Plato’s epistemology; I also assess Burnyeat’s views on these issues.

Knowledge-by-acquaintance before propositional knowledge/belief

More basic than the authors' distinction between knowing and believing is a distinction between knowledge-by-acquaintance (I know John Smith) and propositional knowledge/belief (I know/believe that John Smith lives in Durham). This distinction provides a better account of both the comparative and developmental data.

Literature and Moral Philosophy

The chapter contributes to the development of a pluralistic conception of moral philosophy consisting of a diversity of descriptive activities by exploring one example of how to combine an understanding of the particulars of moral life with the more general and abstract insights traditionally developed in moral philosophy, namely via moral philosophy’s engagement with literature. The chapter is motivated by the argument that the irreducible role of the particular in moral life raises a demand for moral philosophy to interact with other disciplines which may serve as sources of knowledge about the particularities of moral life. It is argued that engagement with literature offers us knowledge by acquaintance and possibilities of moral cultivation, and that literature can be a suitable partner for moral philosophy in three activities that differ from the development of moral theories: namely in the exploration, the critique, and the development of moral life. The last type of activity, where literature is a partner for moral philosophy in initiating forms of moral change, is given special attention, and it is shown that this is an integrated part of moral philosophy, even if it is currently underexplored.

Conoscenze e competenze nell’educazione linguistica

Knowledge (declarative and procedural; tacit and epistemological; implicit and explicit; acquired and learned, operational and pragmatic knowledge); knowledge by acquaintance or by description; knowledge as commodity; competence; competency, capacity, ability, skill, mastery: these are the terms used to define the aims of educational linguistics, that is, knowledge about the language and competence in the language: the analysis vs. use pendulum that has been swinging for the last 25 centuries. The article tries to bring some terminological (and epistemological) order into this cluster of terms.

Cassirer and Kant on the Unity of Space and the Role of Imagination

The focus of this paper is Cassirer’s Neo-Kantian reading of Kant’s conception of unity of space. Cassirer’s neo-Kantian reading is largely in conformity with the mainstream of intellectualist Kant-scholars, which is unsurprising, given his own intellectualist view of space and perception and his rejection of the existence of a ‘merely sensory consciousness’ as a ‘formless mass of impression’. I argue against Cassirer’s reading by relying on a Kantian distinction first recognized by Heinrich Rickert, a neo-Kantian from the Southwest school, between Kenntnis (roughly knowledge by acquaintance) and Erkenntnis (roughly propositional knowledge). Correspondingly, I claim that concepts and categories are conditions for Erkenntnis of objects as such, namely for thinking of and apprehending the pre-existing unity as an object, rather than for the ‘constitution’ of this very unity.

John Grote and James Hutchison Stirling

This chapter considers the work of two less well-known idealists, John Grote and James Hutchinson Stirling. The discussion of Grote begins by uncovering his unique and curious methodology—which is the key to understanding his philosophy—before going on to detail his views about the self, about idealism, and about what he terms the ‘scale of sensations’. In order to appreciate his attitude towards the knowability of thing-in-themselves, it is necessary to explore his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, which was both made famous and misunderstood by Bertrand Russell. James Hutchinson Stirling’s role in ushering in the British Idealist movement has often been noted, but his own views themselves have been but rarely discussed. This chapter rectifies that by considering his position respecting the infinite, the external world, materialism, agnosticism, causality, and free will.

God, Horrors, and Our Deepest Good

J.L. Schellenberg argues that since God, if God exists, possesses both full knowledge by acquaintance of horrific suffering and also infinite compassion, the occurrence of horrific suffering is metaphysically incompatible with the existence of God. In this paper I begin by raising doubts about Schellenberg’s assumptions about divine knowledge by acquaintance and infinite compassion. I then focus on Schellenberg’s claim that necessarily, if God exists and the deepest good of finite persons is unsurpassably great and can be achieved without horrific suffering, then no instances of horrific suffering bring about an improvement great enough to outweigh their great disvalue. I argue that there is no good reason, all things considered, to believe this claim. Thus Schellenberg’s argument from horrors fails.

Introduction

That there is a distinctively philosophical usage of the term ‘acquaintance’ is, of course, due primarily to the influence of Bertrand Russell and in particular to the distinction he famously drew between ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description’. These phrases soon became part of the philosophical lexicon. For example, the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society twice featured symposia on the question ‘Is there knowledge by acquaintance?’, first in 1919...

Deirdre’s Smile: Names, Faces, and ‘the Simple Actuality’ of Another

The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another, or, as Buber does, of the ‘touchable’ human being as ‘unique and devoid of qualities’. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception, it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile being dependent on a recognition of who this is. The fundamental place of particulars, as opposed to kinds (transferable properties), in our thought about those we know and care for is developed in part through a phenomenological treatment of our perception of faces. That treatment is set in a context of the justification of our judgements about who someone is, and is linked with a critique of treatments of proper names of individuals in the spirit of Frege. It is in our speaking to (rather than ‘about’) those we know (rather than ‘know about’) that we find a relation to a particular that is direct—not mediated by a description of its properties—that Russell sought in ‘knowledge by acquaintance’.