PHIL 330 | Epistemology

Epistemology, otherwise known as the theory of knowledge, addresses issues about the nature of knowledge, justification, and truth, issues that arise from questions such as "How do you know?" and "Can you be sure?" It has been an especially lively area of philosophy in English in recent decades; many currents in the humanities appeal to epistemological notions - such currents as post-modernism, relativism, social constructionism, feminism, and situated knowing. This course answers both developments. It introduces such disciplinary concerns as foundationalism, virtue epistemology, internalism and externalism, naturalism, reliabilism, and the Gettier problem. It also engages such wider concerns as relativism about truth and reason and the role of social institutions and social structures, power and privilege, in constituting knowledge.