Tuesday February 24 (Seminari de Filosofia), Thursday February 26 (aula 410) and Friday February 27, 12-14 (Seminari de Filosofia)
Prof. Ernest Sosa (Rutgers, http://www.erniesosa.com/) will offer next month the PhD seminar we had to cancel the previous academic year. It will take place on Tuesday February 24 (Seminari de Filosofia), Thursday February 26 (aula 410) and Friday February 27, 12-14 (Seminari de Filosofia). As probably you already know, the annual PhD course is a mandatory training activity for LOGOS PhD students or those registered in the philosophy branch of CCiL. I am looking forward to seeing you all there.
As usually, the course will be based on a new book taht Ernesto is concluding, title and abstract below, from which he will select his three presentations (and his Colloquium on Wednesday February 25). Professor Sosa has prepared extended outlines of the chapters to be discussed, which can be found in a dropbox file, link below; let me know if you have any problems accessing it.
Dawning Light Epistemology and Bounded Knowledge, E. Sosa (Rutgers)
The seminar (and the colloquium talk scheduled for Wednesday of that week) will take up some chapters of a book manuscript in progress.
A main concern of the seminar will be to explore an alternative to familiar philosophical methodologies, whether internalist and evidentialist, or naturalist, or x-phi. A sort of dawning light epistemology conceptually engineers a supportive setting for realist armchair intuitions. This will be the subject of the first session. The paper for that first session presents a defense of a traditional, intuitions-and-counterexamples methodology still in wide use for work published in contemporary analytic journals. So, the methodology defended in this paper is familiar and widely employed. But the defense of it in this paper is novel and very unusual, and relies heavily on the rejection of both internalist foundationalism and aggressive naturalism.
A second main feature of the seminar will be the idea of “default assumptions.” And here are two ways default assumptions acquire philosophical interest: (a) They define and sustain a distinctive and surprising addition to epistemic psychology, that of assumptions/takings. I argue that they warrant attention because of the pervasive presence they have and deserve (though generally unrecognized) in human doxastic performance. (b) Relatedly, they provide a basis for a novel approach to philosophical skepticism.
In later sessions of the seminar, time permitting, we will consider two main objections to the virtue epistemology defended in the book. One of these is a line of objection against the very idea of instrumental rationality invoked in telic virtue epistemology. And the other line of objection we might consider, finally, is the Lackey dilemma, which has proved persuasive to many, but which is highly questionable, as is argued in this final paper.
The papers to be discussed are available here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/
(The manuscript in progress aims to enhance the telic virtue epistemology laid out in Judgment and Agency (OUP, 2015) and Epistemic Explanations (OUP, 2021). But the new work goes beyond those texts, and no prior familiarity whatever with the earlier work will be presupposed.)
