Overview

The intent of this work is to discover suitable terms for harmonizing the dispositions of both theorist and skeptic and for providing balance between them. Towards reaching balance, the work, in dialectic ways, advances a reconsideration of concepts basic to any epistemology: doubting and affirming, truth and existence, knowing and perceiving, and necessity and contingency. A new account of hypothetical and relative modalities furnishes the mechanism of balance. The work also provides a critical examination of recent defense and criticism of skepticism.

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9780820419855

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The picture of skepticism as an attack not on the possibility of knowledge itself, but on the worth of claims to knowledge, is sustained and developed in most illuminating ways, and I think the discussions should count as major contributions to contemporary controversies over skepticism. I do not think they'll convince everyone. I think at least some, (I, at times) will continue to think that sometimes skeptics are doing more than denying knowledge that we know or disputing the rectitude of claims; sometimes they really want to deny that there is first level reflective knowledge. I was impressed by the way in which various problems in philosophy and areas of philosophy are woven together in the book. I think too often philosophers since Kant, at least, and especially into the 20th century, have tended to cut philosophy into pieces-ethics here, metaphysics there, logic still elsewhere - and sometimes that has tended to create the illusion that these areas of philosophical concern really are fairly isolable from one another. I think it is a strength of the work that no area, nor era, of philosophy is strange to it. (Winston A. Wilkinson, Michigan State University)

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The Author: The author is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He has published books on ancient logic (Aspects of Aristotle's Logic), modern epistemology (On Truth), ethics (On Good and Bad) and on the metaphysics of a theory of virtues (On Virtue and Vice, Lang 1991). Dr. Bosley has been a visting professor at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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