Course info

Epistemology as a sub discipline of Philosophy, has been concerned with three major issues: First what is knowledge or how do we define knowledge, second what are the means of acquiring it or how do you get knowledge, and third, Is knowledge possible or how do you defend knowledge. Most ancient response to these questions come from Plato: in the The Theaetetus he attempts to give a formal definition of knowledge as true belief securely tied down. Since Aristotle however, the second concern, namely how do we know occupied the center stage, and subsequently epistemology moved around this axis, attending majorly to the issues regarding the feasibility and reliability of the methods proposed for acquiring knowledge. The skeptical challenges received attention all through the ages and skepticism as a school flourished side by side with mainstream epistemology ever since the Greek times.Posterior to the Gettier problem, along with standard analysis even other related issues in epistemology began to receive attention. Among the cluster of issues that received attention in the post Gettier period, the prime theme was the justification condition, the most notorious among the three conditions of knowledge. As Gettier himself has revealed in his brief article, the assumptions with which he constructed the counter examples revolve round the two presuppositions with which  justification condition has been  employed down the years,  first that ‘S’ can be justified of believing a proposition h even though h is false, and the second that  justification is preserved in valid reasoning. The reformulations of standard analysis attempted by epistemologists are all in a way attempts to immunise knowledge analysis from the inherent difficulties with which the justification condition suffers in an internalist structure.  The proposed  course would address the issues highlighted here along with some of the contemporary ramifications on it.