The Justificatory Force of Experiences
The Justificatory Force of Experiences

Author: Philipp Berghofer

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-03-24

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 3030961133

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This book offers a phenomenological conception of experiential justification that seeks to clarify why certain experiences are a source of immediate justification and what role experiences play in gaining (scientific) knowledge. Based on the author's account of experiential justification, this book exemplifies how a phenomenological experience-first epistemology can epistemically ground the individual sciences. More precisely, it delivers a comprehensive picture of how we get from epistemology to the foundations of mathematics and physics. The book is unique as it utilizes methods and insights from the phenomenological tradition in order to make progress in current analytic epistemology. It serves as a starting point for re-evaluating the relevance of Husserlian phenomenology to current analytic epistemology and making an important step towards paving the way for future mutually beneficial discussions. This is achieved by exemplifying how current debates can benefit from ideas, insights, and methods we find in the phenomenological tradition.

The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs
The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs

Author: Hans Van Eyghen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-04-14

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 100086829X

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This book assesses whether belief in spirits is epistemically justified. It presents two arguments in support of the existence of spirits and arguments that experiences of various sorts (perceptions, mediumship, possession and animistic experiences) can lend justification to spirit-beliefs. Most work in philosophy of religion exclusively deals with the existence of God or the epistemic status of belief in God. Spirit beliefs are often regarded as aberrations, and the falsity of such beliefs is often assumed. This book argues that various beliefs concerning spirits can be regarded as justified when they are rooted in experiences that are not defeated. It argues that spirit-beliefs are not defeated by recent theories put forth by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists or evolutionary biologists. Additional arguments are made that traditional theistic belief is epistemically linked to spirit beliefs and that unusual events can be explained in terms of spirit-activity. The book draws on theistic arguments, phenomenal conservatism and defenses of religious experiences to argue for the justification of spirit-beliefs. The arguments draw on examples from various religious traditions ranging from Christianity and Islam to Haitian Vodou and Tibetan Bon. The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of religion, religious epistemology, ethnography and cognitive neuroscience.

A Comparative Doxastic-Practice Epistemology of Religious Experience
A Comparative Doxastic-Practice Epistemology of Religious Experience

Author: Mark Owen Webb

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-08-18

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13: 3319094564

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​This book takes a theoretical enterprise in Christian philosophy of religion and applies it to Buddhism, thus defending Buddhism and presenting it favorably in comparison. Chapters explore how the claims of both Christianity and Theravada Buddhism rest on people’s experiences, so the question as to which claimants to religious knowledge are right rests on the evidential value of those experiences. The book examines mysticism and ways to understand what goes on in religious experiences, helping us to understand whether it is good grounds for religious belief. The author argues that religious language in both Christian and Buddhist traditions is intelligible as factual discourse, and so reports of mystical experience are true or false. The book contends that those experiences can be fruitfully thought of as perceptual in kind and that they are therefore good prima facie grounds for religious belief, in the absence of defeating conditions. The work goes on to explore Christian and Buddhist testimony and how the likelihood of self-deception, self-delusion, imaginative elaboration and the like constitutes a defeating condition. It is shown that this defeater has less scope for operation in the Buddhist case than in the Christian case, and therefore Theravada Buddhism is better grounded. This work will appeal to students and scholars of philosophy and philosophy of religion, and those interested in the study of religious experience.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception

Author: Mohan Matthen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-07-02

Total Pages: 944

ISBN-13: 0191669059

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The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception is a survey by leading philosophical thinkers of contemporary issues and new thinking in philosophy of perception. It includes sections on the history of the subject, introductions to contemporary issues in the epistemology, ontology and aesthetics of perception, treatments of the individual sense modalities and of the things we perceive by means of them, and a consideration of how perceptual information is integrated and consolidated. New analytic tools and applications to other areas of philosophy are discussed in depth. Each of the forty-five entries is written by a leading expert, some collaborating with younger figures; each seeks to introduce the reader to a broad range of issues. All contain new ideas on the topics covered; together they demonstrate the vigour and innovative zeal of a young field. The book is accessible to anybody who has an intellectual interest in issues concerning perception.

Religious Experience and Religious Lives
Religious Experience and Religious Lives

Author: Walter Scott Stepanenko

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-09-15

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1666922021

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Religious Experience and Religious Lives: An Epistemology defends a moderate approach to religious experiences in which they can contribute to the justification of central religious beliefs, most importantly belief in God. Epistemologists of religion disagree about what evidential value religious experiences have. Some argue that religious experiences have no evidential value while others argue that religious experiences constitute proof of God's existence. However, Walter Scott Stepanenko argues that religious experiences can contribute to these justificatory cases in several distinct ways and that several justificatory cases are philosophically viable. This book contends that this joint justificatory viability is best explained by the diversity and development of religious lives: as religious believers grow in a faith tradition, their access to an evidential base can develop and the contributory work religious experiences provide in defense of religious belief can change. This suggests that various epistemologies of religious experience implicitly emphasize different life stages or different prototypical religious believers and that a fully adequate epistemology of religious experience will be expansive, pluralistic, and responsive to the diversity of religious believers and their development in a religious tradition.

Emotional Insight
Emotional Insight

Author: Michael S. Brady

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-11-28

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 019150873X

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Michael S. Brady presents a fresh perspective on how to understand the difference that emotions can make to our lives. It is a commonplace that emotions can give us information about the world: we are told, for instance, that sometimes it is a good idea to 'listen to our heart' when trying to figure out what to believe. In particular, many people think that emotions can give us information about value: fear can inform us about danger, guilt about moral wrongs, pride about achievement. But how are we to understand the positive contribution that emotions can make to our beliefs in general, and to our beliefs about value in particular? And what are the conditions in which emotions make such a contribution? Emotional Insight aims to answer these questions. In doing so it illuminates a central tenet of common-sense thinking, contributes to an on-going debate in the philosophy of emotion, and illustrates something important about the nature of emotion itself. For a central claim of the book is that we should reject the idea that emotional experiences give us information in the same way that perceptual experiences do. The book rejects, in other words, the Perceptual Model of emotion. Instead, the epistemological story that the book tells will be grounded in a novel and distinctive account of what emotions are and what emotions do. On this account, emotions help to serve our epistemic needs by capturing our attention, and by facilitating a reassessment or reappraisal of the evaluative information that emotions themselves provide. As a result, emotions can promote understanding of and insight into ourselves and our evaluative landscape.

Cognitive Penetrability and the Epistemic Role of Perception
Cognitive Penetrability and the Epistemic Role of Perception

Author: Athanassios Raftopoulos

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-02-07

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 3030104451

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This book is about the interweaving between cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of the two stages of perception, namely early and late vision, in justifying perceptual beliefs. It examines the impact of the epistemic role of perception in defining cognitive penetrability and the relation between the epistemic role of perceptual stages and the kinds (direct or indirect) of cognitive effects on perceptual processing. The book presents the argument that early vision is cognitively impenetrable because neither is it affected directly by cognition, nor does cognition affect its epistemic role. It also argues that late vision, even though it is cognitively penetrated and, thus, affected by concepts, is still a perceptual state that does not involve any discursive inferences and does not belong to the space of reasons. Finally, an account is given as to how cognitive states with symbolic content could affect perceptual states with iconic, analog content, during late vision.

The Rationality of Perception
The Rationality of Perception

Author: Susanna Siegel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0198797087

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One of the most important divisions in the human mind is between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we take ourselves to have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Reasoning can be better or worse, but perception is considered beyond reproach. The Rationality of Perception argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what weperceive. When the influences reach all the way to perceptual appearances, we face a philosophical problem: is it reasonable to strengthen what one believes or fears or suspects on the basis of an experience that wasgenerated by those very same beliefs, fears, or suspicions? Drawing on examples involving racism, emotion, and scientific theories, Siegel argues that perception itself can be rational or irrational, and makes vivid the relationship between perception and culture.

Expected Experiences
Expected Experiences

Author: Tony Cheng

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-29

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1003827853

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This book brings together perspectives on predictive processing and expected experience. It features contributions from an interdisciplinary group of authors specializing in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Predictive processing, or predictive coding, is the theory that the brain constantly minimizes the error of its predictions based on the sensory input it receives from the world. This process of prediction error minimization has numerous implications for different forms of conscious and perceptual experience. The chapters in this volume explore these implications and various phenomena related to them. The contributors tackle issues related to precision estimation, sensory prediction, probabilistic perception, and attention, as well as the role predictive processing plays in emotion, action, psychotic experience, anosognosia, and gut complex. Expected Experiences will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science working on issues related to predictive processing and coding.

Blockheads!
Blockheads!

Author: Adam Pautz

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-02-12

Total Pages: 649

ISBN-13: 0262348985

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New essays on the philosophy of Ned Block, with substantive and wide-ranging responses by Block. Perhaps more than any other philosopher of mind, Ned Block synthesizes philosophical and scientific approaches to the mind; he is unique in moving back and forth across this divide, doing so with creativity and intensity. Over the course of his career, Block has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of intelligence, representation, and consciousness. Blockheads! (the title refers to Block's imaginary counterexample to the Turing test—and to the Block-enthusiast contributors) offers eighteen new essays on Block's work along with substantive and wide-ranging replies by Block. The essays and responses not only address Block's past contributions but are rich with new ideas and argument. They importantly clarify many key elements of Block's work, including his pessimism concerning such thought experiments as Commander Data and the Nation of China; his more general pessimism about intuitions and introspection in the philosophy of mind; the empirical case for an antifunctionalist, biological theory of phenomenal consciousness; the fading qualia problem for a biological theory; the link between phenomenal consciousness and representation (especially spatial representation); and the reducibility of phenomenal representation. Many of the contributors to Blockheads! are prominent philosophers themselves, including Tyler Burge, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, and Hilary Putnam. Contributors Ned Block, Bill Brewer, Richard Brown, Tyler Burge, Marisa Carrasco, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Hakwan Lau, Geoffrey Lee, Janet Levin, Joseph Levine, William G. Lycan, Brian P. McLaughlin, Adam Pautz, Hilary Putnam, Sydney Shoemaker, Susanna Siegel, Nicholas Silins, Daniel Stoljar, Michael Tye, Sebastian Watzl