HFIA03724U FILO, Module 3: Classical Philosophical Problem: Knowledge and Skepticism CANCELLED

The philosophical problem of skepticism has been and continues to be one of the central problems of epistemology. Theories of knowledge are naturally categorized by how they respond to the skeptical challenge, and a careful study of possible responses to skepticism therefore provides a basic insight into a wide range of theories of knowledge, evidence, rationality and justification.

The structure of the skeptical problem is fairly simple. On the one hand, we take ourselves to know all kinds of things. I know that Obama is the President of the United States, I know that this is the year 2014, and I know that I live in a flat in Copenhagen. On the other hand, most of us find it difficult to see how we could know that we are not in a skeptical scenario. How can I, for example, know that I am not just a bodyless brain plugged into a computer simulation deceiving me into thinking that Obama is President, that the year is 2014, and that I live in Copenhagen?

So am I wrong in taking myself to know that it is the year 2014? Or do I in fact know that I am not a bodyless brain in vat being deceived into thinking that it is the year 2014? And if I know, then how?

In this course we will look at a variety of different approaches to the skeptical problem including contextualist and relativist theories of ‘know’, externalist and internalist theories of justification, virtue epistemological accounts of knowledge, and externalist theories of the mind.

During the course we will also encounter a number of related epistemological problems, such as the lottery problem, the dogmatism puzzle, the problem of easy knowledge, and the problem of induction. We will (among other things) look at different closure principles for knowledge, considerations about higher-order knowledge and issues related to the norm of assertion.