The a Priori and Its Role in Philosophy

Description

Ascertaining the nature and scope of a priori knowledge is of key import to philosophical thought. Philosophers do not merely ponder this issue in order to solve an epistemological puzzle. Philosophers do also strive to understand the a priori in order to understand what doing philosophy amounts to. So what is the nature of a priori knowledge? And is philosophy an a priori endeavour? Starting off from such epistemological and meta-philosophical considerations, the papers here collected trace the import and role of a priori knowledge through the diverse disciplines of philosophy - from metaphysics to ethics, and from the philosophy of Language to the philosophy of science. The A Priori and its Role in Philosophy ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Contents Introduction: The A Priori and its Role in Philosophy A Priori Reasons: Two Difficult Notions and an Even More Difficult Connection Two Types of A Priori Warrant in Content Preservation Modal Knowledge and the Form of Thought Experiments The Vicious Triangle of A Priori Truth, Contingent Truth, and Logical Truth Ungrounded Reason A Priori Justification Apriority, Analyticity and Language Conceptual Truth Defended Analytic Theories of the A Priori The Methodology of Presumption Rules –Between the A Priori and the A Posteriori Concepts, Defaults and Internal Asymmetric Dependencies: Distillations of Fodor and Horwich The A Priori: Between Conventions and Implicit Definitions Remodeling Inference to the Best Explanation – Towards an A Priori Justification of Induction 1 + 1 = 2 – But Why? Is Moral Knowledge A Priori Knowledge? Contributors Index