Böcker av Stephen Hetherington

Philosophy's value and power are greatly diminished when it operates within a too closely confined professional space. Extreme Philosophy: Bold Ideas and a Spirit of Progress serves as an antidote to the increasing narrowness of the field. It offers readers-including students and general readers-twenty internationally acclaimed philosophers who highlight and defend odd, extreme, or 'mad' ideas. The resulting conjectures are often provocative and bold, but always clear and accessible. Ideas discussed in the book, include: - propaganda need not be irrational- science need not be rational- extremism need not be bad- tax evasion need not be immoral- anarchy need not be uninviting- democracy need not remain as it generally is- humans might have immaterial souls- human minds might have all-but-unlimited powers- knowing might be nothing beyond being correct- space and time might not be 'out there' in reality- value might be a foundational part of reality- value might differ in an infinitely repeating reality- reality is One- reality is vagueIn brief, the volume pursues adventures in philosophy. This spirit of philosophical risk-taking and openness to new, 'large' ideas were vital to philosophy's ancient origins, and they may also be fertile ground today for philosophical progress.

Post-Gettier epistemology is increasingly modalized epistemology - proposing and debating modally explicable conditionals with suitably epistemic content (an approach initially inspired by Robert Nozick's 1981 account of knowledge), as needing to be added to 'true belief' in order to define or understand knowing's nature. This Element asks whether such modalized attempts - construed as responding to what the author calls Knowing's Further Features question (bequeathed to us by the Meno and the Theaetetus) - can succeed. The answer is that they cannot. Plato's and Aristotle's views on definition reinforce that result. Still, in appreciating this, we might gain insight into knowing's essence. We might find that knowledge is, essentially, nothing more than true belief.

This textbook introduction offers a new way of approaching metaphysics and epistemology -- via links to ethical and social questions. It asks questions such as: Fundamentally, what are we? And what, if anything, do we know?