Sources of Knowledge: On the Concept of a Rational Capacity for Knowledge

How can human beings, who are liable to error, possess knowledge, since the grounds on which we believe do not rule out that we are wrong? Andrea Kern argues that we can disarm this skeptical doubt by conceiving knowledge as an act of a ratio­nal capacity. In this book, she develops a metaphysics of the mind as existing through knowledge of itself.

Table of Contents:
Cover Title Copyright Contents Introduction: “But We Can Always Err!” Part One: Knowledge and Reason 1. Who Are “We”? A Kantian Answer 2. Knowledge from the Standpoint of Reason 3. The Dogma: Justification without Truth 4. The Puzzle: Truth-Guaranteeing Grounds 1. Agrippa’s Trilemma 2. Two Answers to Agrippa’s Trilemma 3. The Category of a Truth-Guaranteeing Ground 4. Are We Familiar with Grounds Belonging to This Category? 5. The Role of Perceptual Grounds Part Two: The Primacy of Knowledge 1. Objectivity and the Possibility of Error 2. The Paradox of Knowledge 3. Is Philosophy Necessarily Skeptical? 1. The General Redemptive Strategy: Less Is More! 2. The Internalist Variant 3. The Externalist Variant 4. The Paradox Returns 1. The Rigorous Reading: Hume and Kant 2. Grounds and Facts 3. A Transcendental Argument 4. Causality or Normativity: A False Dichotomy 5. The Primacy of Knowledge Part Three: The Nature of Knowledge 1. The Category of a Rational Capacity 2. Rational Capacities as Constitutive Unities 3. Habits and Regulative Rules 4. The Normativity of Rational Capacities 5. Aristotle’s Conception of a dynamis meta logou 6. Rational Capacities as Self-Conscious, Normative Explanations 1. Knowledge as Rational Capacity 2. Knowledge of the Explanation of Knowledge 3. Knowledge as Self-Conscious Act 4. Knowledge and Non-Accidentality 1. The Asymmetry of Knowledge and Error 2. Favorable and Unfavorable Circumstances 3. Fallible Capacities and Knowledge 4. Doxastic Responsibility and Knowledge Part Four: The Teleology of Knowledge 1. Virtue Epistemology and “Epistemic Capacities”: A Critique 2. Rational Capacities as a Species of Teleological Causality: A Kantian Approach 3. Kant’s Refutation of the Idea of an “Implanted Subjective Disposition” 4. Knowledge as a Self-Constituting Capacity 1. Rational Capacities and Practice 2. How Does One Acquire a Rational Capacity for Knowledge? 3. Knowledge and Objectivity 4. Skepticism and Philosophy Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Kern Andrea : Andrea Kern is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Universität Leipzig.

Review :
This is an excellent book. It is lucid, forceful, and rich in thought-provoking ideas. I believe it is one of the most interesting and potentially significant contributions to the field of epistemology of the last decade. Given the richness of its discussion, however, Kern's book will be interesting not just to professional epistemologists, but to a wide philosophical readership. -- Matthew Boyle, University of Chicago This is an extraordinary, daring book. It is an original and powerful contribution to epistemology that reorients, or gets beneath, a number of debates that have shaped the discipline in the last few decades. It reaches beyond the limits of epistemology, locating its results concerning human knowledge within a metaphysics of the human mind, a metaphysics that articulates the self-understanding internal to our existence. -- Christoph Menke, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main