This course is focused on Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits, which is perhaps the most important work of epistemology in the last several decades. Williamson draws on recent developments in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language as he argues for a number of surprising theses: that knowledge cannot be analyzed into parts (e.g. J+T+B); that knowing is a mental state; that epistemic access to one’s own mental states is far more limited that is generally acknowledged; that an agent’s evidence consists in all and only those propositions that the agent knows; and that knowledge is the norm of assertion. Our particular focus will be upon the relationship between knowledge and evidence.
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