The Ethics and Epistemology of Trust Trust is a topic of long-standing philosophical interest because it is indispensable to the success of almost every kind of coordinated human activity, from politics and business to sport and scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and, by extension, for nearly any form of practical deliberation and planning that requires us to

Bodily Awareness Most of us agree that we are conscious, and we can be consciously aware of public things such as mountains, tables, foods, and so forth; we can also be consciously aware of our own psychological states and episodes such as emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and so forth. Each of us can be aware of our body via vision, sound, smell, and so on. We

Ikhwan al-Safa’ Ikhwān al-safā’ (the Brethren of Purity) are the authors of the Rasā’il al-Ikhwān al-safā’ (Treatises of the Brethren of Purity), an Islamic encyclopedia consisting of fifty-two treatises and an additional comprehensive treatise (Risālat al-jāmi‘a) on various philosophical sciences interpreted by Ismā‘īlī Shī‘ī scholars. It covers the mathematical, natural, psychological/rational, and theological sciences and was written in the tenth or eleventh century C.E. The

Immanuel Kant: Transcendental Idealism Transcendental idealism is one of the most important sets of claims defended by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in the Critique of Pure Reason. According to this famous doctrine, we must distinguish between appearances and things in themselves, that is, between that which is mind-dependent and that which is not. In Kant’s view, human cognition is limited to objects that somehow depend on our

History of Love What is love? We all wish to have the answer to one of the most universal, mysterious, and all-permeating phenomena on this planet. And even if we perhaps have a special feeling and intuitive insight that love “is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things,” as Waldo Tobler said, we still have not found and offered

Proper Functionalism ‘Proper Functionalism’ refers to a family of epistemological views according to which whether a belief (or some other doxastic state) was formed by way of properly functioning cognitive faculties plays a crucial role in whether it has a certain kind of positive epistemic status (such as being an item of knowledge, or a justified belief). Alvin Plantinga’s proper functionalist theory of knowledge has