Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In a post last Thursday I mentioned the epistemic issue of "regress." And I described the issue as a trilemma. If we believe A because of B, and B because of C, and so forth ... where and how does this chain stop? If it does stop, why is the chain of reasons that stop better than simply allowing A to float around by itself unsupported? If it doesn't stop, is that because it is infinitely long or because it is circular? All three possibilities seem bad ones. Each of the three possibilities has defenders, though, I mentioned last week that Robert Audi was a defender of a form of foundationalism: the chain does have a final link and that's okay. Infinitism, too, has contemporary champions, notably Peter D. Klein, who has written that this view doesn't amount to "claiming that in any finite period of time ... we can consciously entertain an infinite number of thoughts," merely that "there are an infinite number of propositions such that each on...

Brian Leiter's blog informs me that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recently elevated seven philosophers to the elite honor of membership in said Academy. Sadly, I only recognized one of the seven names on the list. With all due respect to the other six (my ignorance is my problem, after all, not theirs), I will say a few words now about that one, Robert Audi, a professor at Notre Dame (go Irish). Not only does Audi teach philosophy there, he formerly held a chair in the Notre Dame Business School. Audi, whose image you see here, has distinguished himself in epistemology as an advocate of fallibilistic foundationalism. He developed this view in response to the epistemic regress argument. What is all that? Glad you asked, dear reader. We typically seek to defend and justify our beliefs by reference to other beliefs. I believe that the sun will rise in the east in the morning because I believe that the earth will continue to rotate in the same direction that it al...

Robert Audi is a contemporary exponent of intuitionism within the field of moral epistemology. That is, his answer to the question "how do we know what is right" involves an appeal to a quasi-sensory and non-inferential recognition one might call intuition for lack of a better term. His 2013 book MORAL PERCEPTION is one of those that puts this view forward. My understanding is that Audi specifically thinks of duties and their breach as the objects of this intuition. We intuit things like "lying is prima facie wrong." We neither infer it nor are we making a statement of subjective preference when we say such a thing. We intuit it and we are sensing something objectively true when we do so. I think there is something both importantly right and importantly wrong in this. I think that it is appropriate to ground moral judgments in intuitions, but those intuitions are of the goodness of events, not the rightness of actions. Intuitionism, that is, works better wit...