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This chapter examines the relationship between the intellectual projects of eighteenth century thinkers and political authorities. The chapter argues that, in almost all the examined cases, eighteenth century thinkers conceived of their intellectual undertakings as subversive and dissenting ones, both in relation to political authorities and to established corporate intellectual authorities. This chapter extends the analysis from the intellectual/cultural sphere to the social/political one. The primary example examined in this chapter is the career of Shawkani and his complex relationship to power.

This chapter focuses on the life and works of Dr John Radcliffe. Medical practice in the seventeenth century was essentially a craft to be acquired by close study of the work of an adept. Formal qualifications were an ornamental addition to, rather than a functional part of, a medical practitioner's professional equipment. Radcliffe's temperament, his bluff, commonsensical self-confidence, made him very much at home in such circumstances. Radcliffe was a product of Locke's Oxford, which was also the Oxford of Boyle and Christopher Wren, of Sydenham and Willis. The official intellectual life of the place was ossified. In Oxford, as everywhere else, the Protestant Reformation failed to supplant the philosophico-scientific system of knowledge associated with it. Locke was at one with Bacon and Hobbes and all the enquiring minds of the age in rejecting the despotic rule of Aristotelian scholasticism. In his own, comparatively inarticulate fashion, Radcliffe was part of this general movement away from a tradition of intellectual authority.

This chapter begins by discussing the recent turn toward virtue epistemologies, which emphasize longer-term processes of belief formation (in addition to ‘snapshot’ evidential relations), intellectual traits and dispositions (including affections), and targets of evaluation other than propositional belief (e.g., understanding and experiential acquaintance). The introduction indicates issues and options for theorists developing virtue-based accounts of various epistemic properties and goods. It also discusses the rise of social epistemology, which takes seriously the pervasive social distribution of evidence gathering and the resulting necessary roles of trust, testimony, and intellectual authorities. The chapter then provides a roadmap that connects these general epistemological themes to religious faith and locates recent work on the epistemology of faith on it. Emphasis is given to questions concerning entrenched disagreement and trust.

This introductory chapter provides a background of David Oppenheim and his Jewish library. At the core of Oppenheim's identity and activity as a rabbi, intellectual, and communal leader stood his library. His library gained renown among Jewish colleagues and Christian contemporaries. It thus informed the decisions of local courts and distant decisors. He possessed highbrow scholarly material alongside popular pamphlets and broadsides, and he preserved diplomatic exchanges and communal ordinances in manuscript—an archive of contemporary Jewish life. Oppenheim's intellectual authority made him a much-sought-after source for endorsements for newly written books. This book then tells the story of premodern Jewish life, politics, and intellectual culture through an exploration of a book collection, the man who assembled it, and the circles of individuals who brought it into being and made use of it.

This chapter includes case studies of the way reputations are built in the wine market. It explains that wine provides a paradigm for the role played by reputation in introducing novices to a new domain of taste. It observes adult novices in encountering for the first time a new cultural sphere that requires them to make value judgments. By restricting the discussion of newcomers to adults, the chapter avoids the kind of biases associated with deference to intellectual authority in the education of children. Adults being schooled for the first time in the world of wines find themselves facing a cultural domain strongly structured by landmarks about which they initially know nothing.

After addressing the scope and limits of Fund autonomy, this chapter identifies the sources of the IMF’s power to speak with intellectual authority about economic policy. It then analyses conditions of possibility for the Fund’s exercising intellectual authority and influencing advanced economies. It finds that the institution’s ability to achieve this is contingent upon the Fund’s ability to frame policy advice in a way which resonates with policymakers, as well as its ability to mobilize its scientific expertise, knowledge bank, and mandate in a given policy context. Between 2007 and 2009, the Fund’s crisis (and crisis legacy) narrative resonated widely with national authorities. Yet from 2010 onwards the Fund proved something of an outlier in contemporary fiscal policy thinking. Many advanced economies chose not to take up the growth-supporting fiscal policy opportunities the Fund sought to carve out.

This chapter covers the literary and critical works of Karl Pearson and Walter Pater. Pater and Pearson are separated philosophically not by any combat about realism, nor by the thoroughness of their commitment to science and scientific method. The voices of science and of art speak from within consciousnesses they describe as closed off from the realities of the world around them. Pearson has to defend the claims of science to intellectual authority. The Grammar of Science is the culmination of the journey undertaken by Arthur. Pearson's theories of causation, scientific law, and empirical perception are threatened by the problem of the particularity of subjectivities. The resort to the language of science is neither accidental nor gratuitous. Positivism becomes a shadow child of romanticism.

This introduction gives an overview of Zagzebski’s work in epistemology during the last twenty-five years, introducing the papers included in the collection. The subject areas of most of contemporary epistemology are included in these chapters: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, and (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem. Some chapters are among the earliest works published on a given topic—e.g., understanding, intellectual virtue, the value problem for knowledge, intellectual authority. Others take a novel approach to an old problem—Gettier, virtue in religious epistemology, a new transcendental argument against skepticism.

This chapter assesses whether focusing on rules of engagement for fruitful discussions about competing scientific views provides a good strategy for reliably identifying normatively inappropriate dissent (NID). It discusses some of the rules for effective criticism dominant in the philosophy of science literature: shared standards, uptake, and expertise. It shows that although all these criteria appear eminently reasonable as requirements for transformative criticism, what they actually involve is not straightforward. Some of the interpretations of these criteria are likely to identify as inappropriate dissent that is actually epistemically valuable, while other interpretations of these criteria would fail to pinpoint the very cases of dissent that some consider paradigm cases of NID.

This chapter offers an overview of the ways in which dissent from a scientific consensus is epistemically valuable. It contends that dissent furthers scientific progress in various ways, including correcting false empirical assumptions, providing alternative ways of conceiving phenomena, and challenging value judgments. Dissent can also strengthen the justification for consensus views as such views are more likely to be reliable when they survive critical scrutiny, than if they go unchallenged. Similarly, dissent can foster warranted public trust in science because it can assure the public that scientific inquiry is an open and critical process. The chapter also points out that because dissent has these benefits, it imposes epistemic obligations on scientific communities.