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These chapters in this book were written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Wilfrid Sellars's essay ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, a landmark of 20th-century philosophy. Ranging widely through Sellars's oeuvre, the chapters are both appreciative and critical of Sellars's accomplishment. Their topics include the standing of empiricism in Sellars's philosophy, Sellars's theory of perception, his dissatisfaction with both foundationalist and coherentist epistemologies, his critique of idealism and commitment to realism, his conception of picturing, and the status of the normative (both the ‘logical space of reasons’ and the ‘manifest image’) in a broadly naturalistic form of scientific realism. These chapters show how vibrant Sellarsian philosophy remains in the 21st century.

This work proposes a new reading of Christian theology. Examining theological warrants, philosophical debates over the structures of arguments, and the role of beauty in intellectual structures, it suggests theology is inherently systematic, its systematicity reflecting its two subjects, ‘God and other things as they are related to God’ (Aquinas). The roles of the warrants (scripture, tradition, and reason) are re‐evaluated, showing their necessary interdependence. Debates in philosophical epistemology are also examined; these have conventionally contrasted foundationalism and coherentism. A contemporary consensus has emerged, however, of a chastened foundationalism or hybrid foundationalism‐coherentism, in light of which, arguments are understood both as reasoning from foundational propositions and as gaining plausibility from the coherence of claims. Theological arguments also exhibit a dual structure, with propositions underwritten by their dependence on both scripture and tradition and by their coherence in integrated webs, or systems. Theology is therefore shown to be systematic in its fundamental structure. The systematicity of theology is a function of its subject matter, ‘God and other things as they are related to God’. Both the two chief subjects of theology (God and humanity) and theology itself are characterized by rationality and relationality. Theology is therefore doubly mimetic, reflecting its subject matter in its structures of reasoning. The order and harmony of those structures however have an aesthetic appeal and potentially attract because of their beauty, rather than their truth. Theological aesthetics is surveyed, asking whether the beauty of systematic structures counts for or against their truth.

This is a controversial book that challenges established views of contemporary political theory. It offers a synoptic, critical, and comparative analysis of the widely different accounts of how the discipline developed during the twentieth century. Its ‘nature’ is seen as intrinsically pluralistic and internally divided. The discussion utilizes the idea of foundationalism to bring coherence to the complex practices associated with theory during the twentieth century. Overall, the book aims to dispute current monistic trends in the way the discipline is understood. It will be an immensely useful resource for students of politics, as well as in providing critical perspectives on the future of the subject.

On the traditional Cartesian picture, knowledge of one's own current inner experience is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge. The philosophical problem is to explain how we move beyond this knowledge to form a conception of an external world, and to know that the world answers to our conception. This book is in the anti-Cartesian tradition that seeks to reverse the order of explanation, arguing that we can understand our knowledge of our thoughts and feeling only by situating ourselves in a conception of an external world. The argument begins with Frank Jackson's famous example of Mary, who lacks knowledge of what it is like to see color because she has had no visual experience of color. The framework of possible worlds and a new account of self-locating information are used to clarify Mary's situation, and more generally to represent our knowledge of both our inner experience and the external world. The argument criticizes the use by philosophers of the notion of acquaintance to characterize our epistemic relation to the phenomenal character of our experience, and to attempt to provide a foundation for knowledge, and it explores the tension between an anti-individualist conception of the propositional content of thought and the thesis that we have introspective access to that content. The conception of knowledge that emerges is contextualist and anti-foundationalist, but it is argued that this conception is compatible with realism about both the external and the internal worlds.

A language is second‐order, or higher‐order, if it has bound variables that range over properties or sets of the items in the range of the ordinary, first‐order variables. This book presents a formal development of second‐ and higher‐order logic and an extended argument that higher‐order systems have an important role to play in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. The development includes the languages, deductive systems, and model‐theoretic semantics for higher‐order languages, and the basic and advanced results in its meta‐theory: completeness, compactness, and the Löwenheim–Skolem theorems for Henkin semantics, and the failure of those results for standard semantics. Argues that second‐order theories and formalizations, with standard semantics, provide better models of important aspects of mathematics than their first‐order counterparts. Despite the fact that Quine is the main opponent of second‐order logic (arguing that second‐order logic is set‐theory in disguise), the present argument is broadly Quinean, proposing that there is no sharp line dividing mathematics from logic, especially the logic of mathematics. Also surveys the historical development in logic, tracing the emergence of first‐order logic as the de facto standard among logicians and philosophers. The connection between formal deduction and reasoning is related to Wittgensteinian issues concerning rule‐following. The book closes with an examination of several alternatives to second‐order logic: first‐order set theory, infinitary languages, and systems that are, in a sense, intermediate between first order and second order.

The justification of theology within the public square remains a matter of pressing concern. After the dissolution of Christendom, a number of Christian philosophers sought to justify theology relative to a foundation of reason (René Descartes, John Locke) or primal experience (Immanuel Kant). While theologians widely accepted these preconditions and so sought to defend theology by appealing to proof and evidence or religious experience, these efforts more often distorted theology. In order to navigate this debate over theological justification one must understand central epistemological concepts, including faith and reason, justification and knowledge, and foundationalist and coherentist theories of noetic structure. Philosophically, the theory of classical foundationalism that has dominated in modernity has crucial, if not quite fatal, weaknesses. Recently many philosophers, like Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, have embraced a non‐foundationalist epistemology. While philosophical non‐foundationalism has been appropriated by theologians like Stanley Grenz and Nancey Murphy as a way to ensure theological justification and autonomy, the anti‐realist non‐foundationalist themes are deeply problematic and impact adversely on Grenz's and Murphy's proposals. Bruce Marshall offers another way to appropriate non‐foundationalism that avoids anti‐realism while explaining justification and truth within a Trinitarian framework. Unfortunately, Marshall's theory also faces significant philosophical and theological objections. The failure of non‐foundationalism warrants a return to foundationalism, albeit in the moderate form proposed by Alvin Plantinga. While objections remain, Plantinga's proper‐function foundationalism provides the best account of theological rationality, justification, and knowledge, while grounding theological rigour, prima facie doctrinal conservatism, and the potential for a robust ecumenism.

This book argues for several dramatic breaks with the epistemological tradition, while also arguing for significant continuity with epistemology as it has come to be practiced. At important junctures, the book finds a way of “going between” the commonly conceived epistemological alternatives. The result is both a retentive and a revisionary account of various matters: (i) of the character of a priori reflective inquiry, (ii) of conceptual analysis as a form of a priori inquiry and as a cornerstone of philosophical methodology, (iii) of reliabilism, (iv) of epistemological internalism and epistemological externalism, (v) of epistemically relevant, evidence-sensitive, cognitive processes, (vi) of both epistemic foundationalism and coherentism, and (vii) of the role of a priori, a posteriori, and empirical elements within epistemological theorizing itself. “The epistemological spectrum” comprises inquiry ranging from a priori reflection on concepts such as epistemic justification and knowledge to richly empirical work within cognitive science. The conceptual truths regarding justification (for one example) serve to orient a fitting naturalized epistemology, while empirical information is necessarily involved in arriving at determinate specification of what processes are fitting and justificatory of beliefs. The book argues for this “big-tent” understanding of naturalized epistemology. It also illustrates it while arriving at a distinctive form of reliabilism, an importantly expansive view of the range and character of information on which human epistemic agents can and must rely, and a principled way of reconciling what are commonly thought to be incompatible positions such as foundationalism and coherentism.

This book, a wide-ranging overview of the emergence of post-foundationalism and a survey of the work of its key contemporary exponents, presents the first systematic coverage of the conceptual difference between ‘politics’ (the practice of conventional politics: the political system or political forms of action) and ‘the political’ (a much more radical aspect which cannot be restricted to the realms of institutional politics). It is also an introductory overview of post-foundationalism and the tradition of ‘left Heideggerianism’: the political thought of contemporary theorists who make frequent use of the idea of political difference: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou and Ernesto Laclau. After an overview of current trends in social post-foundationalism and a genealogical chapter on the historical emergence of the difference between the concepts of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, the work of individual theorists is presented and discussed at length. Individual chapters are presented on the political thought of Jean-Luc Nancy (including Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, and Ernesto Laclau (including Chantal Mouffe). Overall, the book offers an elaboration of the idea of a post-foundational conception of politics.