Perplexity and Knowledge: An Inquiry into the Structures of Questioning

✍ Scribed by Malcolm Clark (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1972
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 250
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In making his distinction between revisionary and descriptive metaphysics, P.F. Strawson wrote that the former has some value provided that its "partial vision" is at the service of the latter, "which needs no justification at all beyond that of inquiry in general." (Individuals, p. 9) Perhaps we feel no need to ask what justification there is for inquiry in general. But if we do recognize any such need, then we discover that inquiry is self-justifying. The more I put it into question, the more I bring the theme of my inquiry to light in my performance of inquiring. Questioning is the business of philosophers. They are now content to leave the search for detailed information to experts in the various disciplines that have won their independence from philosophy. The questioning a philosopher conducts is of the 'second-order'. He asks about the status of various sorts of questions, the types of knowledge they yield and of con­ fusion into which they lead.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages I-VIII
Introduction....Pages 1-12
Front Matter....Pages 13-13
Alternative Accounts....Pages 15-29
Duality and Self-Correction....Pages 30-48
Front Matter....Pages 49-49
Scepticism and Negative Proof....Pages 51-65
Plato and the Forms of Geometry....Pages 66-81
Aristotle and the Forms of Life....Pages 82-102
Descartes and Reflection....Pages 103-119
Empiricists and Experience....Pages 120-142
Kant and the Uses of Reason....Pages 143-170
Front Matter....Pages 171-171
Perplexity and Progress....Pages 173-191
Sense....Pages 192-206
Intellect....Pages 207-222
Practical Reason....Pages 223-241
Back Matter....Pages 242-246

✦ Subjects

Anthropology