the present essay is a critical study of zagzebski’s reading and criticism of plantinga’s virtue-epistemology. zagzebski, on the account of her definition of knowledge and the role that she assigns to ‘volition’ and ‘awareness’ in virtuous acts, along with her acceptance of the uniformity of moral and epistemic virtue, challenges plantinga’s theory of knowledge. zagzebski believes that although...

The term "translational science" has recently become very popular with its usage appearing to be almost exclusively related to medicine, in particular, the "translation" of biological knowledge into medical practice. Taking the perspective that translational science is somehow different than science and that sound science is grounded in an epistemology developed over millennia, it seems imperat...

Helen Longino’s The Fate of Knowledge offers a positive view of how to integrate social considerations into epistemology, as well as a diagnosis of the failures of previous efforts. I suggest that Longino’s positive account is interesting and fruitful, although her favorite version of pluralism seems unclear and unmotivated. I also argue that her attempt to distinguish her own views from earlie...

Formal treatments of epistemology and epistemological issues have come a great way in recent years. Valuable results have been produced by Bayesians, in formal learning theory (also known as computational epistemology in [Kelly 96] and epistemic logic. While the first to formal approaches concentrate on learning and knowledge acquisition issues, the latter concentrate on axiomatics and validity...

1.1 The Problem ‘What is characteristic of every mental activity’, according to Brentano, is ‘the reference to something as an object. In this respect every mental activity seems to be something relational.’ But what sort of a relation, if any, is our cognitive access to the world? This question – which we shall call Brentano’s question – throws a new light on many of the traditional problems o...

These essays prefigure many of Ryle's later ideas on "social medicine". For Ryle, the biomedical sciences had narrowed the scope ofmedicine in an era when it most needed to expand its horizons, epistemology, and aims. He was later to recruit the methods of the modern social sciences to enhance his idea of clinical practice as the natural history of disease in order to place it on a preventive b...

These essays prefigure many of Ryle's later ideas on "social medicine". For Ryle, the biomedical sciences had narrowed the scope ofmedicine in an era when it most needed to expand its horizons, epistemology, and aims. He was later to recruit the methods of the modern social sciences to enhance his idea of clinical practice as the natural history of disease in order to place it on a preventive b...

While, prima facie, virtue/credit approaches in epistemology would appear to be in tension with distributed/extended approaches in cognitive science, Pritchard (2010) has recently argued that the tension here is only apparent, at least given a weak version of distributed cognition, which claims merely that external resources often make critical contributions to the formation of true belief, and...