Reddit mentions: The best epistemology books

I wouldn't call this opposite, but Marcus Aurelius didn't think life was about pursuing pleasure while, by contrast, Epicurus thought the only objective in life was to pursue pleasure. However, Epicurus didn't define or describe pleasure in a hedonistic sense, as some might infer from the general idea that life should be about pursuing pleasure.

For example: "It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life."

"The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together."

Epicurus -- Principal Doctrines

Schopenhauer also believed that the only happiness possible in this life is the absence of pain.

Hedonism -- as a philosophy -- would identify pleasure, especially physical pleasure, as the highest good in life. And, unlike Marcus Aurelius, rejects the notion that virtue has intrinsic value. Search online for hedonistic philosophers to get a better sense.

Social Darwinism is the name given to the idea that only the fittest humans should survive and assistance should be denied to others for the sake of human progress. Some philosophers who held this view to one degree or another include Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton.

I'd highly encourage you to read Epicurus and the other epicurean philosophers, as well as Schopenhauer. The Social Darwinists can give you a philosophical approach that's very different than Marcus Aurelius, which is what you're looking for. But, Epicurus, the epicurean philosophers (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Epicurean_philosophers), and Schopenhauer can also give you some divergent views, although not diametrically opposed.

Finally, I highly recommend the Skeptic philosophers, such as Montaigne and Diderot, if you're just getting started with studying philosophy. If you're interested, I'd suggest you start with this introductory overview/summary of the Skeptic philosophers and their doctrines:

http://www.amazon.com/Skepticism-Anthology-Richard-H-Popkin/dp/1591024749

I think studying philosophy is one of the most important, most life-changing, most interesting, and most enjoyable things any person can do. I very much wish I had started much earlier in life. It would've saved me from so much unnecessary pain and struggle and so many bad decisions.

Edit -- formatting

Continued from the comment above...

> How come God is in an eternal war with Satan? How can an angel of God be mightier than the almighty? Can't God just zap him out of existence?

Yes, God can just zap Satan out of existence. The traditional answer to your question from both a Jewish and a Christian angle is that God has chosen to use Satan to accomplish God's purposes. Exactly how that all goes down is the subject of literally libraries worth of interpretation, discussion, and theological reflection. Let's bracket it for the time being for the sake of brevity since there's not as great a conflict here between the Christian and Jewish understandings on this point as is the case for the other points you mentioned.

> How do Christians view Jews?

There is no consensus. Many highly admire Jews; others hate Jews; still others are ambivalent. I would guess that most Christians respect the Jews but also completely misunderstand them. Most Christians don't know what most Jews believe or how most Jews act, and most Christians suffer from an anemic doctrine of Israel insofar as systematic theology is concerned. This is something that has only lately begun to recover from centuries of neglect; check out R. Kendal Soulen's The God of Israel and Christian Theology for a jump start.

> Are we lost?

Not all of us! Scripture teaches us that God has always preserved a "remnant," a righteous group of Jewish people who seek God's face according to God's ways. See Genesis 45:7, 2 Kings 19:30, Ezra 9:8, Isaiah 37:32, and Micah 5:8 for some Old Testament examples. Romans 9-11 shows how all of this works right up to a New Testament context, which should be a mission-critical text for you to consider.

> Are we wrong?

Both the average Jew and the average Christian are wrong because their respective theological loci have developed in opposition to each other rather than in harmony with the Bible.

> How do you understand our differences?

See above. Or please elaborate if you want more specific detail!

> This is a bigger question, but I'm curious to see the response. How does the Jewish bible work? How do you know it to be true? It would have to be true for your religion to be true, correct? How does the old testament flow into the new testament?

The Old Testament is most of the Bible, and it is the only Bible that both Jesus and the early church possessed when they spoke of the scriptures, the Law, the prophets, etc. Taking each part of this question in turn based on this first point:

• How does the Jewish Bible work? This is an ill formed question; please specify!
  
  
• How do you know it to be true? I understand the term "truth" primarily through a treatment John Searle developed in his text, The Construction of Social Reality, which basically emphasis the connotation of "trustworthiness." The Jewish Bibile is a rich text, composed and redacted by multiple different people over hundreds of years comprising several different genres of literature. The more historical portions are pretty substantially trustworthy. The more poetic portions, those describing the nature of humanity and our world, are also pretty trustworthy, but in a different way due to the difference in genre. There are multiple prophecies in the Jewish Bible that can be shown to have been delivered far before they came to pass--and not just those that refer to the Messiah. In other words, they were not written after the fact to merely appear prescriptive; they actually, legitimately were prescriptive. When something that diverse appears trustworthy from that many different angles upon inspection, then I conclude that my belief in its overall trustworthiness is well justified; hence, I am comfortable asserting that I know it is true.
  
  
• It would have to be true for your religion to be true, correct? Yes.
  
  
• How does the old testament flow into the new testament? It is impossible to properly understand any of the New Testament without the Old Testament and vice versa. For this reason, my personal reading plan includes a chapter from the Old Testament, a chapter specifically from the Psalms, a chapter from the New Testament gospels, and a chapter from the New Testament epistles so I can remain balanced. There are several passages in the Jewish Bible indicating that God would one day deliver a new covenant to repair the breach of relationship that resulted from the sins of our Jewish people, such as Jeremiah 31:31-34. This is precisely what Jesus came to accomplish through his own sacrifice, which he himself indicated right in the middle of sharing a Seder meal with his disciples during Passover according to Matthew 26:26-30. Multiple other New Testament texts go into the details of how this works, but you can find one quick summary in the first half of the book of Hebrews, especially Hebrews 8. Remember that the terms "covenant" and "testament" are interchangeable. In essence, the Old Testament is the collective witness of God's people about God's faithfulness hinging around God's first covenant delivered through Moses; the New Testament is the collective witness of God's people about God's faithfulness hinging around God's second covenant delivered through Jesus the Messiah.
  
  Woot. We're down to your last paragraph:
  
  > I look forward to the answers. All I ask is that you cite verses you use to answer the questions so I can follow along. I have a copy of the NIV bible along with a Hebrew/English translation of the 5 books of Moses. Also, don't be afraid to not be politically correct. I won't be offended if you call me a Jesus killer or tell me I'm going to hell for not accepting your beliefs today. Be blunt, be honest, be direct. I plan on responding back as soon as possible. And feel free to ask me questions back.
  
  I'll save my questions until I've first heard your feedback on my responses; in the mean time, I'll take care of getting offended at anybody who might call you a Jesus killer (since it is for all of our sins that he laid down his life) or that you're going to hell for not accepting somebody else's beliefs (since this is really sloppy theological language). In the mean time, shalom...

The questions you're asking fall broadly under the province of what's sometimes called "social ontology." People who defend the independent reality of groups (see, for instance, this talk by John Searle)) often do so on the basis of believing in something like collective intentionality as an irreducible phenomenon. People on that side of the issue argue that groups of people (nations, sports teams, Reddit, &c.) can have intentional states like beliefs and desires that aren't just aggregates or sums of the intentional states of the individuals in the group. If that's true, then groups are worth taking seriously as ontologically distinct entities, since they have properties that aren't reducible to the properties of the individuals that compose them. John Searle defends this position in The Construction of Social Reality (which I quite like), arguing that there are "social facts" that cannot be reduced to facts about the beliefs of any well-defined set of individuals, but which are nonetheless mind-dependent (or "constructed"). He uses the example of the worth of a dollar bill: the fact that this piece of paper in my pocket is valid currency clearly rests on the fact that we believe it has value; a dollar is no more intrinsically valuable than any other piece of paper, and its status as a unit of exchange depends on it being treated as one. At the same time, Searle argues, the dollar's value isn't just a matter of opinion or taste--it really does have value in a strong, objective sense--and neither is it a matter of the beliefs of any individual (or set of individuals). There's no particular subset of people who are responsible for giving the dollar its value, and whose individual beliefs serve to ground the dollar's legitimacy as currency. Instead, Searle argues, the dollar's value is the result of a collective intentional state: it has value because society believes it does. It's worth noting that we talk this way all the time: we say things like "Twitter is obsessed with Prince today" or "the internet loves cat videos" or "the Catholic church believes abortion is immoral." If those statements are really just disguised statements about the intentional states of some specific set of individuals, at the very least it's not obvious that this is so.

In contrast, people who endorse methodological individualism argue that any intentional states of groups (or really any social-level phenomena at all) can be understood in terms of the intentional states (or other properties) of the individuals in that group, and so our ontology ought to include only individuals. Methodological individualism is attractive to many people who have libertarian-leaning political views, and underwrites a lot of the theoretical literature supporting libertarianism and free-market ideologies. People who endorse methodological individualism think that any form of collectivism represents a kind of metaphysical mistake, and so there can be no sense in which you have (say) a duty or obligation to a group as a whole; you might have an obligation to several individuals, but that's it--there's no independent collective entity that might have rights, duties, obligations, beliefs, or anything else like that.

I strongly favor the former position. As a number of other commenters have pointed out, there's a clear analogy between this discussion and discussions about mereological sums more generally. If you endorse methodological individualism when it comes to persons, then you need to (at least) give an account of why the mereological decomposition stops there as opposed to somewhere else. That is, if you think that social groups are reducible to mere collections of persons (and so aren't properly included in our ontology), then why can't the same thing be said of persons themselves? After all, individual persons are "mere" collections of individual cells, which are "mere" collections of molecules, which are "mere" collections of atoms, and so on down the line. Unless you can give an account of why persons are metaphysically distinctive composite objects, it's very hard to avoid sliding from methodological individualism into total mereological nihilism.

The standard response here is to appeal to something like the autonomous agency of individual persons as a way of backstopping the reductive slide. We might think that persons are "legitimate" composite objects in virtue of the fact that they're organized, functionally-integrated, fully autonomous entities, not just collections of parts. It's hard for me to see why the same thing isn't true of social groups, though. There are many obvious examples of groups acting as autonomous entities and pursuing their own goals in a way that's not clearly reducible to a story about individual persons pursuing individual goals.

The immediate timely example that springs to mind is the US Presidential election that's going on right now. At this point, it looks virtually certain that the next President of the United States is going to be either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Both Clinton and Trump have overwhelmingly high unfavorability ratings among US voters--Trump is the most widely disliked major Presidential candidate in history, and Clinton is the second most widely disliked. Given that fact, it seems incredibly bizarre that both of them are virtual locks on for their respective party's nomination at this point, which guarantees that we're going to elect either the first or second most disliked candidate available to us. It's hard to see how to explain that from the perspective of methodological individualism: if individual preferences were all that mattered, it would seem that being very widely disliked would be a deal-breaker for someone trying to win a popular election.

The reason that it isn't a deal-breaker, of course, is because the structure of our social organizations matters here, in the sense of having a real causal impact on election outcomes and meaningfully constraining the behavior of individuals in our society. The way both parties nominate candidates, the laws regulating campaigns, the way popular votes are translated into delegates, the way the Electoral College works, and other social-level phenomena have extremely significant sway over how elections come out, such that it's very plausible that the eventual winner of the election will be the person with the lowest popular favorability rating among all the major candidates.

This isn't a unique example, either: groups of individuals take actions that are contrary to the interests and desires of many (or even all) of the individuals themselves all the time, which is why collective action problems (like stopping climate change) are so difficult to solve. The most reasonable explanation for this, I think, is that social groups--like other highly organized composite systems--can be structured in such a way that they impose novel constraints on the behavior of their component parts, and so have causally-significant properties that aren't just reducible to the causally-significant properties of those parts. I've argued that the appearance of this sort of irreducible inter-scale (i.e. "top-down") constraint is a general feature of complex systems, and ought to be expected whenever we have collections of individuals with significant organizational structure. Whether that's true or not, though, it seems hard to maintain that social groups are ersatz objects that don't deserve to be included in our ontology given the incredible proliferation of this kind of behavior. Groups play central, indispensable roles in a wide variety of our explanations and predictions all the time. If that doesn't make them real, I don't know what would.

<Blind faith is un-Buddhist.

I don't disagree, but I'm an academic. The understanding of Buddhism I have is academic and my arguments are based in issues of history as I understand it.

<I quote scholars and you quote yourself, as if you are an authority. State your name and your credentials then.


This tells me that my arguments alone are insufficient to identify me as an authority to you- really I wouldn't claim to be on this topic. As I said, I study mostly American Buddhism today- no I will not provide my name because I like to preserve some anonymity on the internet. I have a M.A and am doing PhD coursework. The problem that you are having is that you are not taking an academic view of the discussion.

>Your faith is greater than your wisdom

This is an ad-hominem fallacy at its best. I'm not Buddhist at all. I have no faith because I study the topic. I respect the tradition but I certainly don't worship in it. This is a discussion about historical understanding- something that you have garnered from questionable scholars. Here is a brief reading list of real scholars you can take and read to see what actual authorities in the field are saying.

Don Lopez: Elaborations on Emptiness
Don Lopez: The Heart Sutra Explained this is a series of translated commentaries on the Heart Sutra. Though it uses the long version, which is problematic.

J.L Austin: How to Do Things With Words This will tell you a lot about the linguistic empiricists and how words function in religious settings.

If you want to read the theory that I do you might also read
Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality
Also:Whithead's Symbolism: It's meaning and Effect
And
Bruce Lincoln's Authority

For Buddhist histories that are not popularist:

Peter N. Gregory: Tsung-Mi and the Sinification of Buddhism

Gimello's Paths to Liberation
or his Studies in Ch'an and Hua-yen

For modern philosophical takes on Buddhism Nancy Frankenberry's Religion and Radical Empiricism though to understand her you need a wider knowledge base than you probably have. Here, let me suggest something for you to read first:

James: The Varieties of Religious Experience
James: The Will to Believe
James: Pragmatism
Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Rorty: Consequences of Pragmatism

This one is particularly important for you:
Rorty: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth

You want to know about the origins of Buddhism? How about Vajrayana?
Snellgrove: Indo-Tibetan Buddhism
Pollock (a great book): The Language of the Gods in the World of Men
For a modern take: Wedemeyer: Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism

Davidson: Indian Esoteric Buddhism
Bhattacharyya: An Introduction to Buddhist Esoterism These last few present conflicting views on the nature of Tantrism, particularly the last one that might fit your "fundamentalist" category.

TO understand American Buddhism better:
Merton: Zen and the Birds of Appetite
Eck: A New Religious America
Tweed (this is one of my favorite books ever) The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844-1912
Neusner (ed) World Religions in America
on individuals: Sterling: Zen Pioneer
Hotz: Holding the Lotus to the Rock Sokei-an was a traditionalist and a near mirror of Thich Nhat Hanh, yet his teachings never took off.
Since you Love Thich Nhat Hanh: Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962-1966 and the companion to that, Merton's journals
Another of Hanh's Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire This is before he was popular and so is much more interesting than some of his later works.

Also Mcmahan: The Making of Buddhist Modernism

I'm definitely not denying the usefulness of skepticism or epistemology (or philosophy). I'm a habitual devil's advocate - I think strongly challenging and testing beliefs plays an important role in discovering where a belief fits in our "scope of truth."

However, when I mention the Matrix, I'm thinking specifically about the brain in a vat problem ("We're all in a simulation!"). It's an interesting idea that plays off of an "obvious" truth (we can't step outside of our minds), but it doesn't provide much practical value beyond intellectual fancying (which is fine, but it's nothing more than that). I feel a similar way about David Chalmers philosophical zombies too.

Don't get me wrong, I think thought experiments can be valuable (I like many of the ones Daniel Dennett describes in his book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking), but they also have a tendency to come off more insightful than they really are.

I recognize philosophy as very important and very practical to know (in general), but some philosophy is definitely more practical than others. That's the lesson I gain from pragmatism.

There's a lot of here. I think you need to study some of this stuff more to compartmentalize these ideas more effectively.

The Britannica encyclopedia link I posted pertaining to post-modernism is a good place to start on post-modernism and it's central themes. If you want, read Derrida on deconstructionism and Foucault on Classical Representation (maybe read, "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice" and "The Order of Things" if you want). Providing simple snapshot summaries on concepts doesn't mean that you should dismiss said concept, but it's up to you to want to dive in deeper. I've only been inspired to research these topics since finding JP a year and a half ago. So I do take issue that there's an offhanded nature to JBP's criticisms since it has had the opposite effect on me. Post-modernism is not evil alone and should be studied and critiqued accordingly, but the problem comes when it's used as a weapon vs a tool to analyze art or literature. I would read Stephen Hicks' book on that particular subject.

If you want to learn more about intersectionality, Wikipedia is a good place to start. Tons of references and further reading to take away from there. (You could also comb google scholar if you can find a free article.) Again, my comments are just helpful snapshots. Not really speaking to the why behind the what. A lot of these sociological terms or topics can be traced back to post-modern ideals.

I linked to Heterodox Academy as I believe it's a good start to understand the problem of viewpoint diversity on college campuses/academia. It's part of the problem of where these SJW's are coming from and part of the massive equation of our current political polarization. Plenty of articles, surveys, polls and things to read on there. I'm looking forward to this book as well on the subject.

It seems that you have a problem with labels in general, but I don't think that has anything to do with the particular label itself, but the problem with labels. They don't paint a full picture and can be misconstrued. Also, I don't think if a problem is "intelectually pathological" that it can be instantly tied to a mental illness/deficiency. An incomplete thought or worldview is a better way of describing it. I want to be specific so as not to conflate (maybe you could make a case if one examined Evergreen State College haha).

The point of my post wasn't to be a slam dunk but to be a jumping off point to start reading. It was evident that some crucial viewpoints weren't being addressed in this thread and I was trying to help bring more to the table.

Also, note, this is Reddit. I'm not here really to make friends or be a source of education, so at the end of the day, it's up to you to research these topics properly.

Also, might be worth a Deke nomination, but I'm not gonna spend the time to make sure unless I also get paid for looking at his book. Oh and he also has a blog.

Some quotes from that page:

> I think most ethical discussions are framed incorrectly. Ethics is about intention, not actions or consequences. I am drawn to ethical nihilism, with one exception: love. Nothing matters except for love

He has also written on free will and doesn't know what compatibilism is, so I don't have high hopes. Oh, and then there's this:

> In my own research, I have discovered a consistent truth: the mainstream conclusions in any field of thought are wrong. And to my surprise, a great deal of confusion comes from mathematics. Modern irrationalism – the lazy acceptance of contradictions into one’s worldview – seems to stem from mathematical errors made around the turn of the 20th century

He has also solved the liar's paradox.

Edit: Also, calls himself an Anarchist(read: Ron Paul fanboy) and is surprised that nobody takes Austrian economics seriously.

I think it's not the best for this particular goal. The section "general introductions" contains a lot of books that are mostly appetizers. If you have already decided to study systematically to build a solid foundation you can downright skip these.

All the books of the other sections are either classics in their own right (therefore, you will study the meat of them in your study of the history of philosophy, and you will do so in the context of what they were replying to, what kind of assumptions they made etc.) or famous but not essential books that have been chosen according to the tastes of the author of the list (therefore you don't need them for foundations; you can always choose to include them in your list if you decide they are valuable in their own right).

So I say skip all the list for now. A much better and much faster way would be to read Anthony Kenny's history of philosophy. If you work through it making sure you understand all the arguments, your focus, thinking, and comprehension skills will already be at another level.

After that, you can start grappling with the Critique of pure reason. Be warned that most of the "introductions", "guides", "explanations" and "companions" to the CPR are actually investigations of obscure points that manage to be harder to read than the actual CPR. The best two books that I found that are actually introductory guides to CPR are this and this.

Despite the titles, they are not "Kant for dummies". They are actually dense expositions which require concentration, familiarity with terms used in philosophy, and knowledge of what came before Kant (both offer a quick overview, but if you don't already know what it's talking about it will just leave you dizzy). Of course, if you have already done step 1, this will be a breeze for you.

I suggest you read both before opening the real CPR, but if you only have patience/time for one: Rosenberg is more one-sided, more focused on certain aspects, and somewhat less clear on some points, but he will really get you excited on what the CPR can mean - it will become a great adventure that could possibly transform your whole understanding of yourself and the universe. Gardner is less exciting, but he is so clear, so exhaustive in predicting what kind of doubt can arise for the reader and in presenting the different interpretations, that it is scary.

Clayton Littlejohn, in his Justification and the Truth-Connection, takes the idea that truth-guaranteeing justification is required for knowledge and develops it non-skeptically.

The picture that comes out is a kind of knowledge-first epistemology (Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits also owes a great debt to Zagzebski).

The author says that

>In order for the level of justification for a belief [to be knowledge] to be non-arbitrary, it is clear that one should be aware of all of the relevant pieces of information

Williamson and Littlejohn would say the only thing you need to be aware of to guarantee the truth of p is p. They argue that "being aware of p" is just another way of saying "knowing that p". So whether you're justified in believing p is determined by whether you are aware that p, which is determined by whether or not you know p.

Similarly, the only evidence you need to have a guarantee of the truth of p is p. If your evidence is what you know (Williamson believes this. Littlejohn's account is more complicated), then we get: Whether you're justified in believing p is determined by what your evidence is, which is determined by what you know.

What this points to, I would say, is that saving JTB by going for SJT doesn't do much saving: Strong justification just is knowledge.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) gets taught very rarely in this department. The department recognizes the need to have a course on Kant's CPR (or, alternatively, on Kant's shorter version of the CPR, his "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics"), but the Maryland philosophy department (a) doesn't have many faculty who work on the history of philosophy, and (b) those faculty who do work in the history of philosophy either do work on ancient philosophy (Rachel Singpurwalla, Quinn Harr, Kelsey Gipe) or on Spinoza and other historical Jewish philosophers (Charles Manekin).

Sam Kerstein of course does work on historical Kant, but Sam's focus and interests in Kant is fairly exclusively directed towards Kant's moral philosophy. This is why Sam teaches a 400-level class on Kant's Groundwork every other year or so.

The upshot is that I am the first person to teach a course on Kant's CPR at this department in many years (6+). I'll probably teach the course again either next school year or, if not next year, then the following year. Unfortunately, that sounds like it might be too late for you (from what you've said, it sounds like you graduate this year).

Fortunately, I would argue that it is better for you to have taken a class on Kant's Groundwork before you graduate than Kant's CPR. Kant's ethics is more important to contemporary philosophy than his epistemology and metaphysics. That being said, I do hope you decide to give the CPR a read on your own time someday or at least read a secondary source on Kant that covers the important content from the CPR in detail.

If you decide to read Kant's CPR on your own, let me recommend some resources. First, I'd suggest you watch the following two videos about Hume and the following three videos on Kant as background (although, unfortunately there isn't a video connecting Kant to Hume through how Kant's CPR is in large part a response to Hume's skepticism):

• Hume's Skepticism 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QpUrSn3cWU
  
• Hume's Skepticism 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPlNsyXl-0c
  
• Kant's CPR 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZtQXteAE-w
  
• Kant's CPR 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQnG0fyEr_w
  
• Kant's CPR 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQnG0fyEr_w
  
  You might want to also read one general secondary source on Kant's whole philosophical system before the CPR. Here are a few suggestions to pick one from - all accessible to a upper-level undergraduate student or graduate student. I am not sure which one would be best to recommend:
  
  
• Paul Guyer's Kant https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Routledge-Philosophers-Paul-Guyer/dp/0415843456/ref=sr_1_22?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504276067&sr=1-22&keywords=kant
  
• Roger Scruton's Kant: A Very Short Introduction https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Short-Introduction-Roger-Scruton/dp/0192801996/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504276050&sr=1-4&keywords=kant
  
• Allen Wood's Kant https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Allen-W-Wood/dp/0631232826/ref=sr_1_27?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504276277&sr=1-27&keywords=kant
  
  There are also several specific secondary sources aimed at upper-level undergraduates and graduate students that specifically cover Kant's CPR. One of these might be useful to have besides you as you read the CPR for those times you get lost:
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Philosophy-GuideBook-Critique-GuideBooks/dp/041511909X/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504276632&sr=1-12&keywords=kant+critique+of+pure+reason
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Kants-Critique-Pure-Reason-Introductions/dp/0521618258/ref=pd_sim_14_34?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=DTHDDSHZVAW06VE9RC48
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Accessing-Kant-Relaxed-Introduction-Critique/dp/0199275823/ref=pd_sim_14_11?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=AZ7XQ4TK2FHQPD91321D

>If ascribing knowledge to S requires S believing a true proposition...

Ascribing conceptual knowledge to S requires S believing a true proposition. Perceptual knowledge (like that held by other animals) does not.

>...how does light hitting retinas or synapses firing cross from non-propositional, non-believed non-truth to propositional, believed truth according to Rand?

Just like any other animal, your brain automatically learns to put the sensations of light hitting retinas, etc. together into perceptions of entities. The starting point of human conceptual knowledge is this stage of entity perception.

The human being then focuses on certain entities from current and remembered perceptions, seeing their differences and relative similarities. Entities that can be differentiated from all others and viewed as similar to each other in certain respects can be mentally grouped and integrated into a concept. The perceptible characteristics the entities have in common are retained, but the specific measurements of those characteristics (differences within the range of "similarity") in each particular are omitted. This would be a first-level concept of a type of entity (say, "rock" or "table.")

Rand's theory of perception and conceptualization is covered in much greater detail in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology

Once someone has concepts, he can form propositions and apply them to the situations/states/attributes of perceived entities. This is something like a reverse of the process of concept formation. The process of concept formation is like an induction (particular to general) and the process of concept/proposition application is like a syllogistic deduction (general to particular.)

There are two ways of answering this question, and most arguments on this issue tend to be arguments between these two responses. The kind of problem that I'm talking about is the subject of Thomas Nagel's book The View From Nowhere, which I highly recommend. I'm going to quote the first paragraph now:

>This book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included. It is a problem that faces every creature with the impulse and the capacity to transcend its particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole.

The question of the (un)importance or (in)significance of humans within the universe stems from our feeling of wonder when presented with unfathomably huge things. It frequently invoked when someone wants to convey a message about the fragility or insignificance of humanity or the earth - Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech is a famous example. This feeling is often called the sublime, although that word has a lot of philosophical baggage. The problem emerges when we contrast our felt importance with our (relative) physical minuteness. Truly understanding our physical insignificance on astronomical scales, it is often said, would cause some sort of psychological breakdown or enlightenment experience.

The two ways of responding to this question tend to be associated with the two views that Nagel was talking about. Which one wins out depends on the individual thinker's philosophical style. Proponents of the "perspective of a particular person" tend to say that humans are important because, well, humans are important. (Another way of putting it is "I am important, because I am important") This is a tautology - but this does not mean that it is wrong, as we shall see. Proponents of the "view from nowhere" (the "objective view") tend to come up with arguments similar to the one you mentioned, based on analyses of physical size or other measurable quantities (like gravitational influence).

These two responses stem from the nature of the word "important". When we say that something is important, we mean that it influences some implied phenomenon to a large extent. Such a phenomenon could be the political stability of a country, or the success of a financial venture, or the answer to a question. For instance, the statement "bees are important" is true when talking about food supplies or biodiversity, but false when talking about what makes for an enjoyable film.

The question arises, then, what is the meaning of "important" when used in a general sense? The two responses I spoke of earlier differ in their answer to this question. For proponents of the perspective of the particular person, something is important in general if its existence and/or state has a large role in determining the state of one's life. (A common variant on this view treats the determining factor as perspectives in general, which is taken to mean humanity or "life"). Obviously - tautologically, in fact - humanity is important on these terms. For proponents of the "view from nowhere", however, what makes something important in general is the magnitude of its influence on existence in general - that is, its role in determining the state of the universe. Gravitational relations (for example) are very important here, as are other fundamental forces or phenomena that affect them to a large extent. However, what is not important here is the existence of a few monkeys on an insignificant rock orbiting an unremarkable star in an unremarkable galaxy.

(There is, of course, a third answer - to take the "view from nowhere", but to treat humanity as fundamental in determining the nature of the universe as a whole. This response is common in religious thought, but is also found in some secular formulations of the anthropic principle. Humanity's influence here is teleological - the universe is understood to be as it is in order to make humanity possible. Thus, if humanity did not exist, neither would the universe.)

I'm talking primarily about the type of people that only believe in the concept of free speech depending on who the speaker is and what the topic may be. People that will use a bullhorn to drown out an (admittedly despicable) white nationalist who is attempting to speak in a public place with the proper permits or invitation. This isn't how free speech is supposed to function, there is a reason that 'bad' speech should also be heard. Many reasons.

Another example may be to suggest that a western literature course should be more fairly balanced towards authors that are women and / or persons of color, so perhaps certain classics may need to be artificially weeded out to make room. This may seem like it isn't harmful - may even seem like the right thing to do on the face of it - but the true method of selection should have nothing to do with the gender or race of an author, but instead should be based on the content of the novel.

As a final example, think of how often you hear people appointing themselves as defenders of certain groups that they consider maligned. People who, perhaps with the best of intentions, appoint themselves the defenders of the LGBTQ community, or various people of color communities, or women or... whomever. These people are labeling and grouping people up in the most 'identity politics' type of manner possible. Most of the time they've never been selected as protectors or representatives by any individuals of said groups, let alone by actual groups of such people. Don't confuse this with someone speaking up when, say, a bigot begins spouting idiotic nonsense about some minority group - these are different situations.

These are a few of the more common examples that I've seen over the past five to ten years.... and I'm probably not very good at explaining this, so if you have any interest the best book I've read on the topic can be found here.

It's no wonder you are confused, because different sources have different interpretations and definitions for the same phrase. I would encourage you to read Bostrom's book on the subject. He goes through the many existing definitions of anthropic principles in the literature and shows how they are variously trivial, implausible, or confusing. Then he replaces them (including the very term "anthropic principle") with his own more formal principles rooted in probability theory. He also has a summary essay; it does not go into the details of these predecessors, but it says:

>Observation selection theory owes a large debt to Brandon Carter, a theoretical physicist who wrote several seminal papers on the subject, the first one published in 1974 [2-5]. Although there were many precursors, one could fairly characterize Carter as the father of observation selection theory – or “anthropic reasoning” as the field is also known. Carter coined the “weak” and the “strong anthropic principle”, intending them to express injunctions to take observation selection effects into account. But while Carter knew how to apply his principles to good effect, his explanation of the methodology they were meant to embody was less than perfectly clear. The meaning of the anthropic principles was further obscured by some later interpreters, who endowed them with additional content quite unrelated to observation selection effects. This contraband content, which was often of a speculative, metaphysical, or teleological nature, caused “anthropic” reasoning to fall into disrepute.[1] The confusion about what anthropic reasoning is about continues to the present day, although there seems to be a growing recognition in the last few years that it is on to something interesting and legitimate.

For the original definitions, refer to Carter.

Here is a contemporary epistemology anthology by Robert Audi and Michael Huemer that's focused on the justification of knowledge. Preview the table of contents for a list of all the readings!

And, here is a brilliant list written up by /u/voltimand:

What is the value of knowledge?

• Ward Jones, “Why do we value knowledge?”
  
  Methodological questions
  
  
• Jennifer Nagel, “Epistemic intuitions.”
  
• Jennifer Nagel, “Intuitions and experiments: a defense of the case method in epistemology.”
  
  Is knowledge the norm of assertion? That is, should we assert p only if we know p?
  
  
• Timothy Williamson, “Assertion” (from Knowledge and Its Limits).
  
• Jessica Brown, “Knowledge and assertion.”
  
• Matthew Weiner, “Must we know what we say?”
  
  Is knowledge the norm of practical reason? That is, ought we only to act on facts we know, rather than believe?
  
  
• John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley, “Knowledge and action.”
  
• Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, “Knowledge norms and acting well.”
  
  Is the principle of epistemic closure right?
  
  
• Fred Dretske and John Hawthorne, “Is knowledge closed under known entailment?”
  
  Can knowledge ever be gained by inference from a false belief?
  
  
• Ted Warfield, “Knowledge from falsehood.”
  
• Branden Fitelson, “Strengthening the case for knowledge from falsehood.”
  

Most of the books for particular areas are going to require a little background knowledge, unless the book is explicitly titled "into to ____," or something like that. You might be better off starting with one of the general introductions, the Blackburn one is good Nagel has a pretty good intro that's not listed.

I don't see why you need more background in epistemology to get started on ethics (if you are worried you won't understand how philosophers come to conclusions in ethics, then you should pick up a book on philosophical methodology, e.g. "how to be a philosopher" books, not epistemology books). If you feel like you do, this book comes highly recommended (ernest sosa knows his stuff about knowing, and he liked it a lot):

http://www.amazon.com/Problems-Knowledge-Critical-Introduction-Epistemology/dp/0192892568

Since intuition comes up a lot in ethics, you may also like some of plantinga's stuff, e.g. Faith and Reason. Although some parts are technical, plantinga has a really fun way of showing how much of knowledge has nothing to do with inference or evidence.

The issues are more complex than just this "View from Nowhere" notion, but it does sum up pretty well the problems when all the media does is say "here's what these guys say, and here's what these guys say" without bringing any context or analysis to these points of view. Most importantly, there's a problem when a very smart, very respected journalist tells you what someone like the President said without questioning it in cases where the things the President is saying are very questionable -- and possibly misleading or dishonest.

You say "I'm just glad the media didn't help sell that BS, cause the media would have pushed for the Iraq invasion, not against it." I don't know if you're joking, but this is actually exactly what happened with journalists like Maureen Dowd at the New York Times, plus many others. The problem is that the mainstream media in the past has too often tended to reflect the views of those in power, hardly touching on the views of critics when it comes to the biggest stories. Things like Iraq are what happen as a result.

Anywhere, here's the link to the "View from Nowhere," also in my initial post above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_from_nowhere

Here's another good discussion of it: http://gigaom.com/2012/05/22/why-newspapers-need-to-lose-the-view-from-nowhere/

And another: http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html

This idea of the "View from Nowhere" comes from this book: http://www.amazon.com/View-Nowhere-Thomas-Nagel/dp/0195056442

Your specific question isn't related because it seems to be due to a confusion, but more generally yes it is related in that there is a lot of work being done in trying to understand how to connect the Born rule to how you "count" the number of worlds. If you really want to dive into this stuff, I can recommend two resources:

Anthropic Bias, by Bostrom (or download legally here)

Everett's thesis (you can also find the thesis online, although this book includes some good commentary)

Appeal to expertise is fine as long as the expert involved can demonstrate a working familiarity (preferably in Dennett-like fashion ) with the topic/ideas in question. There are a number of experts in the area of philosophy, those with Ph.D.s or professorships, who could do so in Rand's case (those at the Ayn Rand Society, say).

Dare I suggest that you're speaking with great confidence from a position of ignorance.

In epistemology, her idea of measurement-omission as the basis of concept-formation sounds pretty unique. In meta-ethics, her identification of "life" as the ground for "value" might or might not be especially unique, although it was something she was arguing for at a time (mid-century) when hardly anyone else seems to have done so. Rand also had ideas in the area of methodology that - for those (e.g., Sciabarra ) who've inquired into this area with the aid of Peikoff courses - look quite rock-solid.

Anyhow, to do a serious Dennett-caliber commentary on Rand/Objectivism, it's necessary to have a working familiarity with the ideas presented in Peikoff's courses - see Rand's endorsement of Peikoff as teacher of her ideas; given her endorsement it doesn't matter that there are ideas here that are barely elaborated upon in Rand's own writings and it simply won't do to ignore this material if one wants to be a credible commentator. (This doesn't mean, of course, that Rand's own writings can't be assessed on their own merits. But it does mean, of course, what I said above about a Dennett-caliber commentary.)

Yes. Counterfactual analyses of causation are pretty popular. David Lewis rehabilitated them, and LA Paul and Ned Hall have done a lot of work sympathetic to counterfactual analyses. See their Causation: a user's guide.

>>philosophical figure

>You are severely overstating Rand's stature.

Well, you're certainly welcome to (try to) defend your (false) assertion with any (supposed) facts you can muster....

Good luck with that. :-)

Meanwhile, this volume, edited by a leading Aristotle scholar at the #3-ranked philosophy department in the world (source), just dropped, so there's that.

In regards to the Russel bit, I think getting into any of his technical works is a mistake for a noob, but this is necessary foundational reading for an amateur who isn't going to college for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy

In my view as an autodidact to philosophy, this was an excellent introduction. I think people really should not be reading selected specific academic works like Rem has suggested without guidance from a professor/teacher. One I've seen suggested before for a typical starting out laymen is:

https://www.amazon.com/Tetralogue-Im-Right-Youre-Wrong/dp/0198728883

My Grandma enjoyed it, she's the most educated person in the family with a Master's in English but never engaged in Philosophy before. If she can read into it amateurly and understand it at 82, no one else has got an excuse.

If people really want to dive deeper, they really should go to college, or just buy a bunch of used books and plow through them, read the IEP and SEP articles on the subjects, compare their understanding with peer-reviewed understandings, etc...

Best place to start for overview of skeptical philosophy from ancient through modern times: http://www.amazon.com/Skepticism-Anthology-Richard-H-Popkin/dp/1591024749.

Afterwards, select the most intriguing philosophers and read them in more detail.

Also, read anything about quantum theory and modern cosmology.

This is a great starting point that will,also amaze you:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Holographic-Universe-Revolutionary-Reality/dp/0062014102

You have good instincts to question your own knowledge. All too often, especially among newly converted atheist communities, you find an arrogance of self-understanding rivaled only by theist counterparts. In many cases, the only thing that changes in the conversion is the content of the beliefs, and not the arrogance and radicalism that goes with some strains of theism.

You might find this book on the history and philosophy of science interesting. It's an easy read. This book takes a more philosophical approach and some of the readings will be more difficult, but you still should be able to learn a great deal.

You could also follow along with a syllabus like this and you'll learn a lot.

>(black holes, statistical data of really any kind, macro scale evolution)

Forget the big stuff. Here's something to ponder: what direct evidence do you have that we live in a heliocentric, and not a geocentric universe? We take it for granted that this is the case today, but if you look at the actual things you experience (e.g. the sun's transversal of the sky), the more intuitive explanation is that we're at the center. We know now that this is the case, but it took a lot of work to figure that out (which you can read about in the first book I mentioned).

I just finished Intuition Pumps by Daniel Dennett. In addition to presenting a variety of thought experiments, Dennett outlines some strategies for thinking about and critiquing said experiments.

The Philosophy Gym is another anthology that might fit the bill. I first encountered this book in a high school philosophy course and remember enjoying it a great deal.

The way that they are reacting is actually statistically demonstrated by social scientists to be the most effective way for religious parents to influence their wayward children to eventually return to religious practice as they age: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/august-web-only/religion-runs-in-family.html

Also keep in mind the the statistical factor that is most likely to lead to a resuscitation of religious practice for a young adult who has strayed is marriage and children. The younger and less financially and socially stable you are when you have children, the more statistically likely you are to be hooked back into a religious community: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/july-web-only/is-family-decline-behind-religious-decline.html

Just make sure that you don't become a young parent, that you seek out secular communities like the Sunday Assembly etc., and that you do your research on miracles and revelation and philosophy, critical thinking, and science in general

>Asking the questions you did means that you don't know philosophy. They were not real questions.

They were certainly real questions, questions very much associated with philosophy. My question was about your standard for evaluating the truth of a philosophy, a question of epistemology. Your first post indicated that the way you evaluate the truth of certain arguments is whether other people, those who are stated experts in philosophy, agree or disagree with them.

I thought this could not be your ultimate standard, so I asked, hoping for a clearer presentation of your view. Instead, I get the answer that either states that the standards of philosophy are readily apparent, or that I am a lost cause for inquiring into your personal metric for evaluating truth.

What I got after that was more examples of appeals to authority and majorities, with no discussion of the content and arguments of Rand's work. What's more, the appeals to authority are false in fact.

> Ayn Rand is not considered a serious scholar by academics, nor by anyone who studies real philosophers like Kant or Sartre.

Allan Gotthelf, who is considered a high-quality thinker and writer on Aristotelian philosophy, has written many books and articles on the topic of Rand and Objectivism in a very positive light.

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Their-Role-Knowledge-Philosophical/dp/0822944243

http://www.amazon.com/Metaethics-Egoism-Virtue-Normative-Philosophical/dp/0822944006/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397776414&sr=1-5

http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Philosopher-Wadsworth/dp/0534576257/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397776414&sr=1-9


But go ahead, laugh me off.

EDIT: Wrong preposition.

>Why exactly shouldn't I doubt my own reasoning? Can you elaborate on "You have no way to get out of it"? Why will I stop learning and not make any great ideas?

If you endorse extreme skepticism, doubt that you know anything at all and doubt all methods of obtaining knowledge, then it's literally impossible for you to learn anything.

>Yes I am currently undergoing an epistemology crisis and would love my view to be changed and any other readings you can present to me would be great.

Okay, here's some reading assignments:

The Problem of the Criterion by Roderick Chisholm - A good introduction to the difference between particularism (what I'm advocating for), methodism, and skepticism.

Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? by Edmund Gettier - Enormously influential short paper for modern epistemology, analyzing whether "justified true belief" works as a definition of knowledge. While this definition works for most things we know, and has been commonly used historically, Gettier makes a fairly solid case that this definition needs work.

Proof of an External World by G.E. Moore - Moore's famous "here is one hand, and here's another" proof. This includes a long discussion of Kantian epistemology as well, if you're interested in that. I personally don't agree with Kant, but it would be remiss not to include and know him.

Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes - Descartes starts off with a similar "extreme" skepticism. I personally don't think he succeeds in getting out of it, but it's worth noting that Descartes thought he did. This is certainly something worth reading.

If you're willing to shill out some money, I'd also recommend Epistemology by Richard Feldman, which goes over a lot of these topics, and if you want to see something a little more advanced, you might also look at Alvin Plantinga's Warrant: The Current Debate, the first book of his trilogy on epistemology.

And of course, the one I've been recommending to you so far, Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind.

>How and why is it too exclusive?

You're trying to set up a standard of knowledge that needs to not be based on anything else, but you're also going to doubt everything that's incorrigible. You're standard for knowledge excludes things we know. The problem isn't that we don't know those things, but that your standard is wrong.

Here are a bunch of resources to get you going:

Philosophy for Beginners is a free introductory lecture series from Oxford University.

The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel.

Check out podcasts. Philosophy bites is a good one for beginners. Here's one on epistemology: Jennifer Nagel on Intuitions about Knowledge

What is This Thing Called Knowledge? is a good introduction to episteology.

Some classic that are accessable for a beginner:

• Meno by Plato and listen to We Don’t Need No Education: Plato’s Meno
  
• Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes and listen to Cogito Ergo Sum
  
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by Hume and listen to David Hume
  
  And here's a free lecture course on epistemology.

Metaphysics:

Conee and Sider's Riddles of Existence is a good place to start, I think.

You might also be interested in epistemology, given your enjoyment of the Matrix. Some epistemologists argue that we cannot know that we aren't in matrix-type scenarios.

Check out Pritchard's What is this Thing Called Knowledge? for a very accessible intro.

John Searle just wrote a book "The Construction of Social Reality" that looks at money in depth, and how we can give something value just by saying it has value. http://www.amazon.com/Construction-Social-Reality-John-Searle/dp/0684831791

You can also listen to the class he teaches on it at Berkley for free.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67309

I see this as being two potentially quite separate issues. The first is simple exposure - please be acquainted some very important contemporary philosophical thinkers:

Slavoj Zizek:

• Zizek!
  
• The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
  
• The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (yet to be released)
  
  Richard Rorty:
  
  
• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
  
• Rorty and His Critics
  
• Philosophy and Social Hope
  
  Bernard Stiegler:
  
  
• Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
  
• Excerpt from The Ister
  
  The other issue you raise with your definition of the word "decent" is that most philosophers have relied on the trickle down effect in order to impact on societal thinking, and the trickle down effect takes time. A lot of philosophers were influential on "tomorrow's" thinking, ie. people didn't realise how important their work was during their lifetime.
  
  What I can tell you is that the works of the three thinkers above are very robust and very relevant to today's thinking.

Bro, I is new to tha philosophy game too. Fucking get on wikipedia, and just keep clicking links till your like "DAMN, THIS GUY SPEAKS TRUUUTH". Then buy his fucking books man. Books are the ONE.

Also this is fucking great as an introduction: http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Does-All-Mean-Introduction/dp/0195174372/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382663106&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=tomas+nagel+what+does+it+all+mean

I would recommend this book if you are just starting out (which you appear to be), and I really wouldn't advise starting with historical texts, they are fun but a text book of sorts does a much better job as a primer.

Use a good translation: http://www.amazon.com/Critique-Reason-Cambridge-Edition-Immanuel/dp/0521657296

Try out Allison (as well as Guyer's) commentaries.

Also check out a good Kantian dictionary: http://www.amazon.com/Kant-Dictionary-Blackwell-Philosopher-Dictionaries/dp/0631175350 (since much of his conceptual scheme consists of neologisms).

Lastly, you should check out Strawson's essay' The Bounds of Sense.' http://www.amazon.com/The-Bounds-Sense-Critique-Reason/dp/0415040302. It's sort of a modern 'take' on Kantian themes (not an exegesis of Kant, but a modernization of some of the arguments. It actually sheds some light on Kant's project).

And good luck, try not to be discouraged. I've had two graduate seminars on Kant and they've both been difficult. But, it's not just nonsense. There is some agreement about the structure (and importance) of many of the arguments in the critique and they're worth grappling with, even if you're dealing with reconstructions of the arguments from commentaries.

> one is in THIS one

But "this" one only means the one you're in. No matter which one you were in, that would be "this" one to you.

If you draw from an urn of poker chips while blindfolded, and there are many more white chips than red, if you have to make a guess whether you're holding a white chip or a red one, white is the best guess. It doesn't mean you know for sure or you've proven it, just that it's the best assumption to make.

To extend the analogy back to Bostrom's argument, he's saying that white chips, signifying simulated universes, assuming for the sake of argument they are possible, would be great in number. He is basing that assessment on our own experience with the utility and popularity of simulation and simulated toy worlds.

>And we don't know how many others simulated or not there are

We do not. Bostrom's reasoning is that, if a civilization develops the technology to run simulations, they would not run it merely in one instance, no more than we developed Virtual Machine frameworks only to run one VM instance. They didn't make Sim City and run the program once. So, his arguments hold, either simulation is impossible, or simulations will be great in number. He doesn't purport to prove that simulating a universe is possible, but he's saying, if you accept these premises, then...


>if we fail to make any simulations this will not mean we know this is real and not simulated.

We already have simulations, just simplified ones. The point is not that we will "know" that our universe is simulated vs real, either way, rather what it is reasonable to assume given the premises.

>that makes no difference to our knowledge of the number of other universes which may or may not exist.

If we manage to simulate universes, that will be proof that doing so is not impossible. We will have established that it can be done. We won't have proven that other technological civilizations exist, or that they engage in universe-simulation, but proving it isn't the point. This is not a scientific hypothesis. Bostrom is a philosopher, and he's exploring reasoning first explored by Brandon Carter in his doomsday argument. It's also an extension of ideas Bostrom explored in his book Anthropic Bias.

24 years ago was a better time for me as well.

"The Prince" [Niccolò Machiavelli]

"The Demon-Haunted World [Carl Sagan]

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" [Douglas Hofstadter]

"On War" [Carl von Clausewitz]

"Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking" [Daniel C. Dennett]

Well, in short, even though scientism is a tempting position because of our cultural exaltation of science as some sort of special and super-objective category of knowledge, there are all sorts of ways of discovering facts that don't rely on physical evidence. Consider mathematical proofs, they do not require any physical evidence but rather logical deduction.

Here's a good book on basic theory of knowledge.

Another way to state this concern, in a more meta-philosophical way, would be that philosophers are really interested in figuring out what knowledge is. They want to get the details right and understand what that means.

One could make a K=JTB~GC or something, but that doesn't tell us what is doing the '~GC' work. Furthermore, what does such a view say when you get into the epistemology literature like Linda Zagzebski's "The Inescapability of Gettier Problems"?

A further concern, along these same lines, is that with a K=JTB~GC account, we don't know how to evaluate that position other than criticizing it as ad hoc. Thus, closing off a natural route to something like Timothy Williamson's view that knowledge is prime.

This is all just to say that the reasons for it are somewhat methodological and are concerned with the answer being unsatisfying given the goals of epistemology, and it (kinda) closes off new theories of knowledge that reject the JTB model.

Maybe try Robert Audi's or Michael William's introduction. They come at issues from somewhat different angles, but both are quite good.

The book you have linked is anthology of texts by various writers whereas Audi's book is a textbook by a single author. So I would imagine it would be easier to follow Audi's book for people that are new to epistemology. I also remember reading some chapters from Richard Feldman's Epistemology in an undergraduate course and they have been quite well written.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M9JL27L/

Though honestly it's a little tedious and drawn out. It's not expensive though and it's very short. Steve Patterson has a youtube channel as well, so maybe it could have been summarized in a 10 minute video rather than book format.

You might get a lot out of John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality which deals more with ontology than ethics, but in that sense I think it's more interesting.

As far as I remember, most of his ideas are generally compatible with theistic and atheistic ideas of "reality."

For a critique of certain aspects of Pearl's approach, you might be interested in:

http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3710361/Hall_StructuralEquationsCausation.pdf?sequence=2

Also, Ned Hall and Laurie Paul have a new book that provides an decent overview of the philosophical literature:

http://www.amazon.com/Causation-Users-L-A-Paul/dp/0199673454

"Nonphysical" is just a term and it needs a context. Again, I think your question isn't clear enough to answer. Let me just recommend a book that I think will address much of what I think you're interested in.

The Construction of Social Reality by philosopher John Searle.

Can we link to Amazon? FWIW, this book is a really clearly written--but not at all sophomoric--introduction to epistemology, which is a pretty central theme/issue in philosophy for lots of reasons. (Just in case the link doesn't work, it's Michael Williams' Critical Introduction to Epistemology)

https://www.amazon.com/Problems-Knowledge-Critical-Introduction-Epistemology/dp/0192892568/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517609206&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+williams+epistemology

EDIT: I know you said you don't want "known philosopher's work" but I took that to mean the 'classics', so to speak, of which this book is not really one... but sorry if you were explicitly not looking for book recommendations!

Read an intro to epistemology textbook. This will give you the basics of various theories of knowledge. I really liked this one.

A book that presents a cynical, nihilistic theory of knowledge or a critique of rationality won't be an introductory book for the study of knowledge. https://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Contemporary-Readings-Routledge-Philosophy/dp/0415259215 this book has some background info and essays from various authors that are relevant to most areas of the study of knowledge (origin of knowledge, structure of knowledge, skepticism). Bit dry but it's useful for getting a foundation on the subject.

Here's a short list I made a while ago:

• SEP Articles
  
• Descartes – Meditations on First Philosophy
  
• Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
  
• Locke – An Essay on Human Understanding
  
• Ayer – Language, Truth, and Logic
  
• Russell – The Problems of Philosophy
  
• Quine – Two Dogmas of Empiricism
  
• Sellars – Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
  
• Williams – The Problems of Knowledge
  
• Rorty – Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
  
  /u/LeeHyori's recommendation of Audi and Huemer's anthology is fantastic as well.

For Kierkegaard, the ideality of being an individual is not a Platonic Idea, but something we strive to become. This does not logically presuppose or imply subjectivism or constructivism vis-à-vis the reality of that becoming.

Besides that, human “constructs” are already themselves a part of reality (a part of “social reality,” as Searle would put it). So if there is “not reason to think the world of the ‘ideal’ contains such a thing,” that may have more to do with your particular conceptions of reality, of ‘the ideal’, and of their relationship—and not with any defect in Kierkegaard’s conceptions.

If you're willing to do soul crushing research:

Investigate the rise of post-modernism. From its religious anti-Enlightenment roots. To its modern incarnation as identity politics. There's a rather dry, but insightful book on the subject. It dives deep into the actual philosophy of the movement.

Cross-reference that with the timeline of communism switching from economics tactics of revolution to identity politics in the late 60s. Read David Horowitz's memoir, for a personal anecdotal account of that era.

Note how the majority of "radical" feminists are open marxist. Note how "Patriarchy" and "the System" is just another term for America and the processes that made America the great land it was. Note the goal of "smashing the Patriarchy" is a call to destroy democracy and liberty. Note that the "Patriarchy" is just a rebranding of communist "bourgeoisie", and feminists themselves a rephrase of the proletariat. Note the attack on Free Speech and the right of association--literal pillars of American life--are being hacked away by progressive ideology.

Read this then let's talk: http://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/0393348784/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422159073&sr=8-1&keywords=intuition+pump.

We are nearly in a new era for most people in the West, especially, that is called postmodernism. Those who subscribe to these belief describe themselves as post modernists as described by philospher Stephen Hicks in his book Explaining Postmodernism:

https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau-ebook/dp/B005D53DG0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=epact&linkId=c4b6919e8aae23984578628924f18a37