Philosophy 122

This course will be a survey of contemporary epistemology. The first part of the course will involve examinations of various sources of justification and knowledge (including perception, memory, consciousness, reason, and testimony). The second part of the course will be concerned with the structure and growth of justification and knowledge (this will include topics such as inference and the extension of knowledge, foundationalism, and coherentism). The third and final part of the course will be about the nature and scope of justification and knowledge and the problem of skepticism (this will include attempts to analyze knowledge in terms of justification, truth, and other concepts, naturalistic accounts of knowledge, and problems for such analyses like the Gettier problem, and skepticism). We will use both a textbook and a collection of primary texts by various epistemologists (mainly, contemporary ones, but also some ancient and early modern philosophers).

Required texts: “Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction”, second edition, by Robert Audi, Routledge. “Epistemology: Contemporary Readings”, edited by Michael Huemer, Routledge.

Prerequisites: at least one previous philosophy course.