Epistemology - Belief, Justification, Rationality | Britannica

epistemology

Table of Contents

Introduction
The nature of epistemology
- Epistemology as a discipline
- Two epistemological problems
  - Knowledge of the external world
  - The other-minds problem
Issues in epistemology
- The nature of knowledge
- Five distinctions
  - Mental and nonmental conceptions of knowledge
  - Occasional and dispositional knowledge
  - A priori and a posteriori knowledge
    - Necessary and contingent propositions
    - Analytic and synthetic propositions
    - Tautological and significant propositions
    - Logical and factual propositions
    - Necessary a posteriori propositions
  - Description and justification
  - Knowledge and certainty
- The origins of knowledge
  - Innate and acquired knowledge
  - Rationalism and empiricism
- Skepticism
The history of epistemology
- Ancient philosophy
  - The pre-Socratics
  - Plato
  - Aristotle
  - Ancient Skepticism
  - St. Augustine
- Medieval philosophy
  - St. Anselm of Canterbury
  - St. Thomas Aquinas
  - John Duns Scotus
  - William of Ockham
  - Scientific theology to secular science
- Modern philosophy
  - Faith and reason
  - Epistemology and modern science
  - René Descartes
  - John Locke
  - George Berkeley
  - David Hume
    - Kinds of perception
    - Relations of ideas and matters of fact
    - Cause and effect
    - Substance
  - Immanuel Kant
  - G.W.F. Hegel
- Contemporary philosophy
  - Continental epistemology
  - Analytic epistemology
    - Commonsense philosophy, logical positivism, and naturalized epistemology
    - Perception and knowledge
    - Realism
    - Phenomenalism
    - Later analytic epistemology

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Philosophers have disagreed sharply about the complex relationship between the concepts of knowledge and certainty. Are they the same? If not, how do they differ? Is it possible for someone to know that p without being certain that p, or to be certain that p without knowing that p? Is it possible for p to be certain without being known by someone, or to be known by someone without being certain? In his 1941 paper “Certainty,” Moore observed that the word certain is commonly used in four main types of idiom: “I feel certain that,” “I am certain that,” “I ...(100 of 23160 words)

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