An important allegory throughout the history of philosophy is Plato’s allegory of the cave. There are remarkable similarities between this allegory and an allegory from Islamic philosophy—that of western exile (al-ghurba al-gharbiyya) proposed by Suhrawardī. This paper seeks to consider fundamental components and issues within the two allegories, including the issue of the soul as the ...

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expresse...

Common sense knowledge plays an essential role for natural language understanding, human-machine communication and so forth. In this paper, we acquire knowledge of events as common sense knowledge because there is a possibility that dictionaries of such knowledge are useful for recognition of implication relations in texts, inference of human activities and their planning, and so on. As for eve...

According to reliabilism, knowledge is basically true belief acquired through a reliable process. Many epistemologists have argued recently that reliabilism fails to accommodate our pre-systematic judgment that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. The paper pinpoints where this so-called swamping argument goes wrong. It is then argued that true beliefs that are reliably acquired ar...