Epistemology, history of

By Pappas, George S.

Epistemology has always been concerned with issues such as the nature, extent, sources and legitimacy of knowledge. Over the course of western philosophy, philosophers have concentrated sometimes on ...

Wodeham, Adam (c.1298–1358)

By Wood, Rega

An English Franciscan theologian, Wodeham was preoccupied with logical and semantic questions. He lectured for about a decade on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, first at London, then at Norwich ...

Testimony

By Coady, C.A.J.

Philosophical treatment of the problems posed by the concept of knowledge has been curiously blind to the role played by testimony in the accumulation and validation of knowledge ...

Anti-positivist thought in Latin America

By Weinstein, Michael A.

Anti-positivist philosophy arose in Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the dominance of closed positivistic systems of historical development in the climate ...

Epistemology

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. Epistemology has been primarily concerned with propositional knowledge, ...

Mind and body in early modern philosophy

By Duncan, Stewart

European philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proposed a wide range of views about the nature of the mind and its relation to the body. ...

Port-Royal

By Pearce, Kenneth L.

Port-Royal-des-Champes was an abbey in France, initially located near Versailles, but later moved to Paris. Its importance to the history of philosophy is due primarily to a group ...

Epistemology

By Klein, Peter D.

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge (see Knowledge, concept of). There is a vast ...

Williamson, Timothy (1955–)

By Ball, Brian

Timothy Williamson is a British analytic philosopher, who has made major contributions in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and philosophical methodology. ...

Nicholas of Autrecourt (c.1300–69)

By Perler, Dominik

Unlike most of his late medieval contemporaries, Nicholas of Autrecourt did not subscribe to Aristotelianism. Instead, he radically challenged the foundations of Aristotle’s metaphysics and epistemology by asking ...

William of Ockham (c.1287–1347)

By Panaccio, Claude

William of Ockham is a major figure in late medieval thought. Many of his ideas were actively – sometimes passionately – discussed in universities all across Europe from ...

French philosophy of science

By Gutting, Gary

A distinctively French tradition in the philosophy of science began with Descartes, continued through the Enlightenment in works such as D’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire and the Encyclopédie, and flowered ...

Cousin, Victor (1792–1867)

Victor Cousin’s intention was to institute a ‘twofold reform in philosophy’ ([1828] 1991: 349) – namely, a spiritualist reform in psychology and an eclectic reform in the history ...

Empiricism

By Alston, William P.

In all its forms, empiricism stresses the fundamental role of experience. As a doctrine in epistemology it holds that all knowledge is ultimately based on experience. Likewise an ...

Illumination

By MacDonald, Scott

The most influential theories of illumination explain certain features of our knowledge by developing an analogy with ordinary sensory vision and the role played in it by light. ...

Knowledge, concept of

By Klein, Peter D.

The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge is called epistemology (from the Greek epistēmē meaning knowledge, and logos meaning theory). ...

Medieval philosophy

By MacDonald, Scott; Kretzmann, Norman

Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe from about ad 400–1400, roughly the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. Medieval philosophers are the ...

Religion and epistemology

By Plantinga, Alvin

Epistemology is theory of knowledge; one would therefore expect epistemological discussions of religion to concentrate on the question as to whether one could have knowledge of religious beliefs. ...

Epistemology

Epistemology has been traditionally concerned with questions about the nature, value, and scope of knowledge, together with other questions that arise in relation to these. Hence, another name ...

Justification, epistemic

By Foley, Richard

The term ‘justification’ belongs to a cluster of normative terms that also includes ‘rational’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘warranted’. All these are commonly used in epistemology, but there is no ...

Religion and epistemology

Epistemology is theory of knowledge; one would therefore expect epistemological discussions of religion to concentrate on the question as to whether one could have knowledge of religious beliefs. ...