Philosophy 742 - Seminar in Epistemology

Critical survey of basic issues concerning knowledge. Representative questions include What is knowledge? Can knowledge be purely a priori? Is there a defensible distinction between the analytic and the synthetic? What is the nature of empirical evidence? Is it possible to justify inductive inference? How can we confirm beliefs about unobservable entities?

Pre Req: 3 PHIL courses (UG) This course will focus on questions about self-knowledge, and we will intensively examine two recent works on the topic: Alex Byrne's Transparency and Self-Knowledge, and Quassim Cassam's Self-Knowledge for Humans. A seminar paper of 20 to 25 pages will be due at the end of the semester; a short account of roughly five pages, proposing a topic for the seminar paper, will be due approximately three-quarters of the way through the semester