Is knowledge humanly possible? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) looks at skeptical arguments, starting with Ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, and moving forward into contemporary brain-in-a-vat scenarios. We’ll review a variety of reasons to worry that knowledge might be impossible, and we’ll examine the difference between global and local forms of skepticism.

In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) looks at three historically influential responses to the challenge of skepticism. We start with René Descartes’s efforts to prove that God would not let us be chronically deceived. Next, we examine Bertrand Russell’s efforts to disprove the skeptic through a strategy called ‘inference to the best explanation’, and we finish with G. E. Moore’s common sense approach.

How do contemporary philosophers respond to the threat of skepticism? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) reviews the semantic (or meaning-based) theories of Hilary Putnam and David Chalmers, according to which skepticism either self-destructs, or isn’t as scary as you might think. She then examines the defensive approach of Timothy Williamson, an approach whose goal is not to convert you from being a skeptic back into believing in knowledge, but rather to protect you from becoming a skeptic in the first place.

Is knowledge the same as justified true belief? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) discusses a Gettier case, a scenario in which someone has justified true belief but not knowledge. We’ll look at a Gettier case from Edmund Gettier’s famous 1963 paper on this topic, and a structurally similar case from 8th century Classical Indian philosophy.

If we can’t analyze knowledge simply as justified true belief, can we add one more ingredient to produce a successful analysis? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel examines two ‘extra ingredient’ analyses of knowledge: Michael Clark’s ‘no false lemma’ analysis, and the fancier ‘no undefeated defeaters’ analysis of Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson.

Is knowledge a matter of being causally connected to the world in the right way? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) examines the causal theory of knowledge proposed by Alvin Goldman in 1967, and then discusses the problems with the causal theory that led Goldman to formulate his influential reliabilist theory of knowledge.

Problems for the causal theory of knowledge led epistemologists to propose that knowledge is a matter of tracking the truth. Fred Dretske and Robert Nozick developed this idea using counterfactual conditions. In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (Northern Illinois University) examines the tracking idea, considers how it improves on the causal theory, and then discusses some well known objections to the theories advanced by Dretske and Nozick.

After many failed attempts to construct an analysis of knowledge, some philosophers began to wonder whether knowledge was resistant to analysis, and why that might be so. In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) looks at the reasons why philosophers like Linda Zagzebski have thought that knowledge can’t be reductively analyzed, and explores the “Knowledge First” approach of Timothy Williamson.

In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (Northern Illinois) introduces virtue epistemology, an approach to epistemology that takes intellectual virtue as the central concept in discussions of theory of knowledge. Along the way, he shows how virtue epistemology can provide interesting solutions to some of the problems that we’ve encountered so far in the series.

In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (Northern Illinois) explains epistemic contextualism, which says that the word “know” is a context-sensitive term. Geoff describes how contextualists claim to dissolve the problem of radical skepticism, and discusses the argument for contextualism from our ordinary linguistic usage.

What makes a judgment count as intuitive? How is intuition different from perception and reasoning? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) examines the nature of intuition and the role played by intuitions in philosophy.