Encyclopedia Summary: Epistemology

Source: Stanford Encyclopedia

History

Plato

Plato’s epistemology was an attempt to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge (unlike mere true opinion) is good for the knower.

Lock

Locke’s epistemology was an attempt to understand the operations of human understanding.

Kant

Kant’s epistemology was an attempt to understand the conditions of the possibility of human understanding.

Russell

Russell’s epistemology was an attempt to understand how modern science could be justified by appeal to sensory experience.

Modern

How our degrees of confidence are rationally constrained by our evidence
The ways in which interests affect our evidence, and affect our rational constraints more generally.