Abstract: One important strand of Sellars’s attack on classical foundationalism from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is his thesis about the priority of is-talk over looks-talk. This thesis has been criticized extensively in recent years, and classical foundationalism has found several contemporary defenders. I revisit Sellars’s thesis and argue that is-talk is epistemically prior to look...

In their quest to refute the sceptics’ challenge possibility of knowledge, epistemologists have over years strived demonstrate how our beliefs can be appropriately justified. This paper critically examines two these traditional or anti-sceptical theories justification, namely: Foundationalism and Coherentism, as well three famous post-Gettier justification: Reliability, Defeasibility Causal the...

This paper critically evaluates the regress argument for infinitism. The dialectic is essentially this. Peter Klein argues that only an infinitist can, without being dogmatic, enhance the credibility of a questioned non-evident proposition. In response, I demonstrate that a foundationalist can do this equally well. Furthermore, I explain how foundationalism can provide for infinite chains of ju...

Abstract There is a ubiquitous claim in the grounding literature that metaphysical foundationalism violates principle of sufficient reason (PSR) virtue positing level ungrounded facts. I argue foundationalists can accept PSR if they are willing to replace fundamentality as independence with completeness and deny ground strict partial order. The upshot be compatible both infinitism, so presuppos...

Complexity-nonlinear dynamics for my purposes in this essay-is rich with metaphysical and epistemological implications but is receiving sustained philosophical analysis only recently. I will explore some of the subtleties of causation and constraint in Rayleigh-Bénard convection as an example of a complex phenomenon, and extract some lessons for further philosophical reflection on top-down cons...

T HE problem of the Cartesian Circle is sometimes treated as though it were merely an exercise for scholars: Descartes fell into it, and their job is to get him out of it. But more is at stake than extricating Descartes. In its generalized form, the Cartesian Circle is none other than the Problem of the Criterion, a problem that any epistemology must face. Moreover, to solve the problem of the ...

Neuroscience offers more than new empirical evidence about the details of cognitive functions such as language, perception and action. Since it also shows many functions to be highly distributed, interconnected and dependent on mechanisms at different levels of processing, it challenges concepts that are traditionally used to describe these functions. The question is how to accommodate these co...