Reality? Knowledge? Philosophy!

Stephen Hetherington is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. He has written three books on epistemology - Epistemology's Paradox (1992), Knowledge Puzzles (1996), and Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge (2001).

• Preface; Using This Book; Acknowledgments; 1.Persons; 1.1 Physicalism; 1.2 Immaterialism; 1.3 Dualism; 1.4 Questions of personal identity; 1.5 'No longer the same person'; 1.6 Conventionalism; 1.7 Descartes on what persons are; 1.8 Locke on personal identity; 1.9 Hume on personal identity; Further reading; 2. Free Will; 2.1 Determinism; 2.2 Fatalism; 2.3 What is free will?; 2.4 Indeterminism; 2.5 Evidence of free will?; 2.6 Moral responsibility; 2.7 Foreknowledge; 2.8 Hume's compatibilism; Further reading; 3. God and Evil; 3.1 The traditional problem of evil; 3.2 The world as a whole; 3.3 The evidence-problem of evil; 3.4 The free will defence; 3.5 Socrates's challenge; 3.6 Evil within people?; Further reading; 4. Life's Meaning; 4.1 Criteria of meaning?; 4.2 The myth of Sisyphus; 4.3 Plato's cave; 4.4 Nozick's machines; 4.5 Living ethically; 4.6 Living philosophically; 4.7 Aristotle on the best way to live; Further reading; 5. Death's Harm; 5.1 Objective harm?; 5.2 Epicurus and Lucretius on being dead; 5.3 Being deprived by being dead?; 5.4 Dying; 5.5 Never dying; 5.6 Brain death; Further reading;; 6. Properties; 6.1 The problem of universals; 6.2 Platonic Forms; 6.3 Label nominalism; 6.4 Class nominalism; 6.5 Resemblance nominalism; 6.6 Individualised properties; 6.7 Essentialism; Further reading; 7. Truth; 7.1 Caring about truth as such; 7.2 Correspondence; 7.3 Coherence; 7.4 Pragmatism; 7.5 Disagreement; 7.6 Claiming truth; 7.7 Social constructivism; 7.8 Social facts; Further reading; 8. Well Supported Views; 8.1 Objective support; 8.2 Fallibilism; 8.3 Reliabilism; 8.4 Popper and testability; 8.5 Intellectual virtue; 8.6 Agreement; 8.7 Epistemic relativism; Further reading; 9. Knowledge; 9.1 Knowledge's objectivity; 9.2 A traditional conception of knowledge; 9.3 Gettier's challenge; 9.4 Avoiding false evidence; 9.5 Knowing luckily; 9.6 Gradualism; 9.7 Fallible knowledge; 9.8 Education; 9.9 Taking knowledge seriously; Further reading; 10. Observational Knowledge; 10.1 Purely observational knowledge; 10.2 Observational limits?; 10.3 Empiricism; 10.4 Representationalism; 10.5 Berkeley's idealism; 10.6 Phenomenalism; 10.7 Perception and reliability; 10.8 Hume on causation; 10.9 Non-inferential knowledge; Further reading; 11. Pure Reason; 11.1 Rationalism; 11.2 A priori knowledge; 11.3 Plato's rationalism; 11.4 Descartes's rationalist method; 11.5 Kant on a priori knowledge; 11.6 Mill's radical empiricism; 11.7 Logical empiricism; 11.8 Fallible a priori knowledge; Further reading; 12. Sceptical Doubts; 12.1 Blended knowledge?; 12.2 Scepticisms; 12.3 Descartes's dreaming argument; 12.4 Descartes's evil genius; 12.5 Hume on induction; 12.6 Other minds; 12.7 Being freely rational; 12.8 Moore and commonsense; 12.9 Knowing fallibly; 12.10 Improved knowledge; 12.11 What you are; Further reading.