Dean Nelson, the author of an upcoming book on Polkinghorne wrote a nice piece for USA Today in which he touches on the subject of certainty and how good science (and religion) can do without it. [More]

Defining philosophy, like defining any complex subject, is challenging. It’s challenging partly because it’s been around so long but also because it has many parts. But plenty of people have attempted to define the discipline and I’m going to take a stab at it in this article. [More]

In the previous article in this series, we started looking at the object of belief as a means of unpacking the belief component of JTB. In this essay, I explore this idea further and describe how the distinction relates to the Gettier Problem. [More]

John Schellenberg argues that when one believes something, she is not directing her mind towards a proposition. That is the object of belief is not a proposition. [More]

Articles and news that might be of interest to the philosophically minded. [More]

We’ll start our exploration of belief with a puzzle. [More]

What is the nature of a believing act? How is the content of a belief related to a speech act? How do beliefs refer to things in the world? [More]

Schmidt-Petri has shown that whether we take Smith’s belief as referential or attributive in all three cases he does not know P2 because he has not satisfied the requirements of JTB not because JTB is inadequate in some way. [More]

A propositional understanding of the intentional objects of belief may be inadequate and this may partly be what engenders Gettier-style counter examples to JTB. [More]

On the surface, Gettier’s scenario seems to present a clear case against the sufficiency of JTB. Smith has justified, true, belief but clearly doesn’t have knowledge so JTB is inadequate. But if we examine the belief we'll see that something has gone wrong with the case, not with JTB. [More]