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Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief

Online ISBN:
9780191869280
Print ISBN:
9780198831518
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief

Maria Rosa Antognazza
Maria Rosa Antognazza
Professor of Philosophy, King's College London
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Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
16 May 2024
Online ISBN:
9780191869280
Print ISBN:
9780198831518
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book offers a major, historically informed intervention in contemporary epistemology. From the pre-Socratics until the mid-twentieth century, it reveals, the ‘standard’ conception of knowledge was not (as is commonly supposed) justified true belief (JTB). The genuinely ‘traditional’ view was that belief and knowledge are mutually exclusive mental states, involving different mental faculties, and playing distinct and complementary roles in our cognitive lives. An exceptionally lucid and authoritative survey of the history of this now unfamiliar conception provides a springboard for reintroducing it into contemporary debate. Accepting some of the findings of ‘knowledge first’ epistemology, it argues that belief is a distinct and indispensable mode of cognition which aims at truth when knowledge is out of reach. Applying innovative methods to an vast range of materials on a rich variety of interconnected topics, this is a rare philosopher and a work of exceptional interest.

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