Philosophy 335: Theory of Knowledge

Transcription

1 Philosophy 335: Theory of Knowledge Spring 2010 Mondays and Wednesdays, 11am-12:15pm Prof. Matthew Kotzen Office Hours Wednesdays 1pm-3pm 1 Course Description This is an advanced undergraduate introductory course in epistemology, or the philosophical study of knowledge and justified belief. The course will be roughly divided into two parts; in the first part, we ll address various philosophical questions about knowledge, and in the second part, we ll address various philosophical questions about justification. 2 Course Requirements There is a prerequisite for the course of one prior college course in philosophy. If you have questions about whether you re qualified to take the course, please come talk to me about it. It is essential that you attend lectures and do the readings for the course. There will be a lot of material presented in lecture that isn t in the readings, and vice versa. You are responsible for everything in both the lectures and the readings. If you must miss a lecture, you should arrange to get notes from a classmate. Even though this is a lecture course, there is a class participation component. Though this will vary a bit, I intend to spend approximately 50 minutes of each class lecturing, leaving approximately 25 minutes for discussion. In addition to class participation, there will also be two short papers, one paper rewrite, a Midterm, and a Final. You must complete all of the course assignments in order to pass the course. 1

2 3 Texts There are two texts for the course that you will need to purchase, either from the UNC Bookstore or from somewhere else. They are: Epistemology by Richard Feldman, and Three Conversations About Knowing by Jay Rosenberg. There will be other course readings, which will be made available on the BlackBoard site for the course. 4 Assessment Paper 1 ( words): 10% Paper 1 rewrite: 10% Midterm: 20% Paper 2 ( words): 20% Final: 20% Class Participation: 20% 5 Outside Sources In general, I do not recommend using sources other than the lectures and assigned readings for your papers; in my experience, this often leads to confusion, since different philosophers often use the same terms somewhat differently. I especially do not recommend Wikipedia as a reference source, as it is often incomplete, inaccurate, and confusing on philosophical topics. I do recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (available at plato.stanford.edu/) for general background reading on philosophical terms and topics. In addition, I highly recommend Jim Pryor s guides on reading philosophy (available at and writing philosophy papers (available at 6 Plagiarism The UNC Instrument of Student Governance defines plagiarism as deliberate or reckless representation of another s words, thoughts, or ideas as one s own without attribution in connection with submission of academic work, whether graded or otherwise. You are on your Honor not to commit plagiarism or other forms of academic dishonesty, and I am on my Honor to report any suspected cases of academic dishonesty to the Honor Court. In your papers, you may use whichever standard citation convention that you d like (Chicago Manual of Style, MLA, footnotes, endnotes, etc.), as long as you apply that convention consistently. But any words that you borrow from any external source must appear in quotation marks, and you must provide some sort of internal citation (i.e., a footnote or endnote) indicating where those words came from. If you do borrow words 2

3 from an external source, it is not sufficient to merely cite the external source on a Works Cited page; you must quote the relevant passage and provide an internal citation. It is also a form of plagiarism to closely paraphrase text from an external source without citation, changing a few of the words but imitating the structure of the external source. Text that appears in your papers outside of quotation marks must be your own words, and it must be presented within your own organizational structure. In addition, please bear in mind that plagiarism can be committed non-deliberately; if you are reckless with your use of other people s words or ideas, then you have committed plagiarism even if you didn t mean to. If you have any questions at all about proper citation of other people s words or ideas in the course, please don t hesitate to come talk to me about them. 7 Schedule The following is a somewhat tentative schedule of reading assignments for our class meetings. There may be some rearrangement of topics based on how long it takes us to get through certain topics, but the basic structure will be as follows: 7.1 Introduction to Epistemology 1/11 Course Overview 1/13 Read Unger, A Defense of Skepticism 1/18 NO CLASS UNIVERSITY HOLIDAY 1/20 Read: Selection from Nozick, Philosophical Explanations; Selection from Pollock and Cruz, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge; Selection from Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Selection from Van Inwagen, Metaphysics; Feldman Chs 1 2, esp. pp and 22-23; also pp. 177 top of 182 1/25 Read Feldman pp Theory of Knowledge The Dreaming Argument 1/27 Read Descartes, First Meditation and Objections and Replies, Meditations on First Philosophy 3

4 2/1 Read: Rosenberg s First Conversation and to bottom of p. 22 in Second Conversation; Feldman pp ; Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism Ch 1 2/3 No new reading Evidentialist Responses to Skepticism 2/8 Read: Feldman pp , , , ; Blumenfeld and Blumenfeld, Can I Know That I Am Not Dreaming? Relevant Alternatives Theory 2/10 Read: Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism Ch 2; Cohen, Skepticism and Everyday Knowledge Attributions, pp The Gettier Problem and Extra-Evidential Theories of Knowledge 2/15 Read: Gettier, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? ; Selection from Harman, Thought; Rosenberg pp. 20 top of 40; Feldman Ch 3 Paper 1 due 2/17 Read: Dretske, The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge ; Cohen, Skepticism, Relevance, and Relativity 2/22 Read: Goldman, Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge ; Feldman pp Contextualism 2/24 Read: DeRose, Contextualism: An Explanation and Defense ; Feldman pp ; Selection from Sosa, Skepticism and Contextualism ; Selection from Kornblith, The Contextualist Evasion of Epistemology 3/1 Catch-up 3/3 In-class Midterm 3/8 NO CLASS SPRING BREAK 3/10 NO CLASS SPRING BREAK 4

5 7.3 Theory of Justification The Regress Argument and Cartesian Foundations 3/15 Read: Russell, The Problems of Philosophy Chs 1 2; Dicker Perceptual Knowledge pp ; Feldman pp ; Armstrong, Is Introspective Knowledge Incorrigible? 3/17 No new reading Reliabilism 3/22 Read: Rest of Rosenberg s Third Conversation; Goldman, What is Justified Belief? ; Feldman pp Paper 1 rewrite due 3/24 Read BonJour, Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge 3/29 Read Feldman and Conee, Internalism Defended 3/31 NO CLASS 4/5 No new reading Foundationalism vs. Coherentism 4/7 Read BonJour, Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation? 4/12 Read BonJour, The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism 4/14 Read: Alston, Level Confusions in Epistemology ; Feldman pp /19 Read Alston, What s Wrong With Immediate Knowledge? Liberalism vs. Conservatism 4/21 Read Pryor, The Skeptic and the Dogmatist Paper 2 due 4/26 Read White, Problems for Dogmatism 4/28 Final Exam Review 5/3 at noon: Final Exam 5