What should we believe?
Every person faces this question. On countless issues ranging from local gossip to to the vexing questions of politics and religion, we all must make choices about the important beliefs we will accept, promote, and defend.
Human beings have always made these decisions, but only in the past four hundred years have philosophers become especially self-conscious about questions of right and wrong in the way of belief. This class will examine the major works on philosophy in the tradition of modern epistemology.
We will usually begin by grounding ourselves in the (sometimes technical) abstract theories advanced by major philosophers. But we will also examine important practical applications of their theories, especially on the topic of religious belief. How do we know if there is a God? Should we rely on reason or faith? Must we have evidence, or should we believe whatever works for us? These are central epistemological questions.
Email Benjamin.Bayer@ColoradoCollege.edu for more information. About Ben Bayer
Here are a few key topics we'll discuss:
Can we find a stable point on which all of our knowledge depends?
How do we evaluate the testimony of others? Is it a kind of faith?
How should we evaluate "religious revelation"?
Is what we know just a matter of luck? Or is it an achievement that depends on our willful effort?
Can we base our beliefs on objective facts, or is reality a subjective construction?
Here are some of the figures we'll address:
Rene Descartes is thought of as laying the foundations of modern philosophy--and his epistemology characterizes human knowledge in general as building on "foundations." Descartes thinks he can use reason to single-handedly establish the existence of God and certainty about the objects of science. Quite a task!
John Locke tries to identify the sensory foundations for human knowledge, but also accounts for right and wrong belief in matters where he thinks no knowledge is to be found. Unlike Descartes, Locke's theory is offered as guidance for every thinking person, not just ivory tower intellectuals. Even so, Locke insists that even religious revelation must be held subject to the constraints of reason.
David Hume takes Locke's theory and runs with it. Knowledge restricted to Locke's kind of sensory foundation turns out to be harder to find than Locke might have thought. Hume is relentlessly skeptical about the security of our scientific and religious beliefs, and, like some modern biologists, insists that our beliefs are really just products of natural instinct.
Thomas Reid thinks Hume (and everyone else) has simply refused to abide by common sense. Nature (and God) provide us with a reliable set of tools to acquire knowledge. We shouldn't worry about finding the "foundations" of knowledge--none are available, anyway, since there is no single source for our beliefs. We don't have to work hard for our knowledge, Reid thinks--we just happen to be lucky to have it already.
Immanuel Kant thinks previous philosophers have gotten everything backwards. Our knowledge is made possible, not by unfiltered data that enters some "source" of the mind, but by the mind's own imposition of structure on that data. This limits our knowledge only to what the mind can construct--but leaves room for keeping beliefs about subjects outside of the scope of our knowledge, including pragmatically useful beliefs about religion and morality.
William James thinks that the division between strict knowledge and merely pragmatic belief is artificial. our beliefs are informed by the data of experience, but we accept them only when we integrate that experience into our lives in a useful way--whether the use we make is scientific, or religious and cultural.