Three basic problems in contemporary epistemology are discussed. The first is the conflict between foundationalists and fallibilists. The second is the problem of scepticism. The third is the question of what sort of considerations are relevant to justification. The recent literature is surveyed and some original contributions are offered.

Marc Lange offers a stale anthology that reflects the sad state of affairs in the camp of analytic philosophy. It is representative in a few respects, even in its maltreatment of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Popper. Despite its neglect of Wittgenstein, it shows again that Wittgenstein is the patron saint of the analytic school despite the fact that it does not abide by his theory of metaphysics as inherently meaningless.

Catherine Beattie; The Paradigm Case Argument: its use and abuse in education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 77–86.

One of the most characteristic claims of the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as the philosophy of ordinary language, is that traditional philosophical discourse has usually been logically improper because it has depended upon systematic misuses of certain expressions in ordinary language and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with the description of the actual use of language. To substantiate this claim, the philosopher of ordinary language has had (...) to establish at least the following two general philosophical theses, which together seem to constitute the hard core of original doctrine in the philosophy of ordinary language. First, that the meaning of an expression is its use and not its referent or what it corresponds to. Second, that the description of the uses of certain expressions in language is not merely a study of words but genuinely solves the same problems which traditional philosophy had tried to solve through other methods. (shrink)

In his influential paper "Epistemology Naturalized" Quine argues that Carnap's failure to define disposition predicates and his subsequent preference for reduction sentences naturally lead to an entirely naturalized epistemology. This conclusion is too hasty, I object. Applying the account of dispositional predicates developed in No. 26 I defend Carnap's aprioristic epistemology against Quine's attacks.

Flew strongly defends a compatibilist thesis in the free will debate before going on to totally object to theistic libertarianism. His objections basically rely on his compatibilism embracing the notion of agent causation, which is not very common in compatibilist theses. Since he is a strong proponent of ordinary language philosophy, he also holds that linguistic analyses can certainly solve the free will problem as well as many other problems of philosophy. In doing so, he first uses the paradigm cases (...) based on our common sense experience and then assumes the verity of principle of alternative possibilities. This study attempts to show, on the one hand, that there are some serious difficulties in both his justification of compatibilism and his objections to theistic libertarianism, and on the other hand, that he cannot easily defend both at the same time. (shrink)