Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis

Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis
Edward Craig | 1991-02-28 00:00:00 | Oxford University Press, USA | 184 | Germany
In this illuminating study Craig argues that the standard practice of analyzing the concept of knowledge has radical defects--arbitrary restriction of the subject matter and risky theoretical presuppositions. He proposes a new approach similar to the "state-of-nature" method found in political theory, building the concept up from a hypothesis about its social function and the needs it fulfills. Shedding light on much that philosophers have written about knowledge, its analysis and the obstacles to its analysis, and the debate over skepticism, this compelling work will be of interest to students and scholars of epistemology and the philosophy of language.
Reviews
This book managed to solve two years of painful wrangling with the Oxford epistemology paper in the day or so it took to read it. Nozick, Goldman et al are all deftly dealt with and dismissed. The problems of knowledge cannot be "solved", but Craig presents a new, lucid way of approaching them that demonstrates the problems of traditional analytic approaches to philosophy and how they have tried (and failed) to handle the problems raied by Edmund Gettier.

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