What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology

Description

This book encourages renewed attention by contemporary epistemologists to an area most of them overlook: ancient philosophy. Readers are invited to revisit writings by Plato, Aristotle, Pyrrho, and others, and to ask what new insights might be gained from those philosophical ancestors. Are there ideas, questions, or lines of thought that were present in some ancient philosophy and that have subsequently been overlooked? Are there contemporary epistemological ideas, questions, or lines of thought that can be deepened by gazing back upon some ancient philosophy? The answers are 'yes' and 'yes', according to this book’s 13 chapters, written by philosophers seeking to enrich contemporary epistemology through engaging with ancient epistemology. Contents List of Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction: Ancient Epistemology’s Potential Significance for Contemporary Epistemology • Stephen Hetherington and Nicholas D. Smith 1 Socrates’ Version of the Opacity Objection • R. Wolfe Randall and Nicholas D. Smith 2 Knowledge-Minimalism: Reinterpreting the Meno on Knowledge and True Belief • Stephen Hetherington 3 Plato on Veritism and Value • Russell E. Jones 4 Forms, Exemplars, and Plato • Keith Lehrer 5 Is Plato’s Epistemology about Knowledge? • Jessica Moss 6 Plato’s Ideal Epistemology • Whitney Schwab 7 Plato on Having a Logos (Theaetetus 201c–210a) • Hugh H. Benson 8 Transmitting Understanding and Know-How • Stephen R. Grimm 9 Aristotle’s Disjunctivism • Rosemary Twomey 10 Aristotle’s Virtue Epistemology • David Bronstein 11 Aristotle and Scepticism • Pierre Le Morvan 12 Pyrrhonian Scepticism and Human Agency • Ernest Sosa 13 Academic Justifications of Assent • Thomas A. Blackson Index of Passages General Index