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6 unusual facts about epistemology


Allan Gotthelf

It was suggestions from both Gotthelf and Leonard Peikoff which motivated Rand to write her extended monograph on concepts, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

Chinese whispers

Epistemology, the study of the properties of knowledge and truth

Clare W. Graves

Graves created an epistemological theory that he hoped would reconcile the various approaches to human nature and questions about psychological maturity.

Morris Janowitz

This led Janowitz to develop a dichotomous epistemic framework, consisting of two competing perspectives about the proper use of the armed forces in international relations.

Oscar Nuccio

In 1987 the study Economic Epistemology: the role of the concepts of 'nature' and 'natural law' in the genesis of the economic won the "Seventy-fifth Prize" awarded by the Review of Economic Policy.

Personal identity

These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes.


Arthur F. Bentley

Arthur Fisher Bentley (October 16, 1870 in Freeport, Illinois – May 21, 1957 in Paoli, Indiana) was an American political scientist and philosopher who worked in the fields of epistemology, logic and linguistics and who contributed to the development of a behavioral methodology of political science.

Brian Boyd

In 1979 Boyd completed a PhD at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, in the context of Nabokov’s epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics.

Confirmatory factor analysis

In confirmatory factor analysis, the researcher first develops a hypothesis about what factors s/he believes are underlying the measures s/he has used (e.g., "Depression" being the factor underlying the Beck Depression Inventory and the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression) and may impose constraints on the model based on these a priori hypotheses.

École nationale supérieure d'informatique pour l'industrie et l'entreprise

Some Humanities topics are added: Languages (students have to successfully pass the TOEIC before the end of their studies), Epistemology, ...

Epistemic modal logic

While epistemology has a long philosophical tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, epistemic logic is a much more recent development with applications in many fields, including philosophy, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, economics and linguistics.

Ernst von Glasersfeld

Elaborating upon Giambattista Vico, Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology, Bishop Berkeley's theory of perception, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and other important texts, von Glasersfeld developed his model of Radical Constructivism, which is an ethos shared by all of these writers to one degree or another.

Esther Meek

She is the author of Longing to Know (2003), in which she elaborates an epistemology based on the multiperspectivalism and presuppositionalism of John Frame and the tacit knowledge theory of Michael Polanyi.

Experimental philosophy

Following the work of Richard Nisbett, which showed that there were differences in a wide range of cognitive tasks between Westerners and East Asians, Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (2001) compared epistemic intuitions of Western college students and East Asian college students.

Formal epistemology

Stephan Hartmann (Bayesian epistemology, probability, collective decision-making, etc.)

Freya Mathews

Her work is mainly concerned with ecological philosophy but also deals with questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics as well as a variety of themes, such as cosmology, place, identity and indigeneity versus modernity.

George Panthanmackel

He has taught several subjects: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophical Anthropology, Methodology, Sociology, Public Administration, Political Science, History of Western Philosophy, Contemporary Indian Philosophy, Marxism, Trinity, and English Literature.

Igor Škamperle

He studied and wrote about the political thought of Machiavelli, the historical epistemology of Alexandre Koyré and various religious manifestations such as shamanism.

J. G. A. Pocock

His first book, entitled The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law elucidated the common law mind, showing how thinkers such as the English jurist Edward Coke (1552–1634) built up a historical analysis of British history into an epistemology of law and politics; and then how that edifice later came to be subverted by scholars of the middle to late seventeenth century.

Jana S. Rošker

In her research she mostly examines subjects related to Chinese philosophy, Chinese logic, Chinese epistemology, the methodology of intercultural research and the theory of knowledge.

Maciej Gołąb

In his book Musical Work Analysis he develops some of Roman Ingarden’s concepts on the epistemology of an actually existing work of music.

Margaret J. Osler

Osler compares the epistemology of Walter Charleton (working within the first tradition) with that of Descartes (working within the second).

Paul Rebhan

He also rents himself out as a "friend", and wrote a philosophy book that seems to share a similar skeptical viewpoint of epistemology as Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist philosopher.

Prima facie

Among its most notable uses is in the theory of ethics first proposed by W. D. Ross, often called the Ethic of Prima Facie Duties, as well as in epistemology, as used, for example, by Robert Audi.

Quasi-empiricism in mathematics

This and other evidence led many mathematicians to reject the label of Platonists, along with Plato's ontology—which, along with the methods and epistemology of Aristotle, had served as a foundation ontology for the Western world since its beginnings.

Romanticism and Bacon

The chief spokesman for Romantic philosophy and the 'science of science' or epistemology, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Soft ontology

Hirsch used the term to broaden and expand on what William James discussed in his landmark 1907 work in epistemology, Pragmatism.


see also