Certain Doubts

SLU announces a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to explore the subject of intellectual humility. The project will focus on a variety of philosophical and theological issues relevant to the topic of intellectual humility, including: virtue epistemology; regulative epistemology; peer disagreement; intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy and deference to authority; religious pluralism; divine hiddenness; intellectual humility and theological method; biases, heuristics, dual-process theories and evolution; intersubjectivity and mind reading.

This project will fund a variety of activities, including a competition for up to 16 research grants in philosophy and theology, for research between June 2014 to May 2015.

Additional funding opportunities include:

• Two one-semester visiting faculty research fellowships at SLU, for one term in the 2014-15 academic year.
• Four one-year postdoctoral fellowships at SLU for the 2014-15 academic year.
• Four one-year dissertation research fellowships at SLU for the 2014-15 academic year.
• Five external cluster groups: interdisciplinary discussion/reading groups for regular conversation on the topic of intellectual humility during the 2014-15 academic year.
• Summer Seminar on Intellectual Humility, for 10 to 12 advanced graduate students and junior faculty (no more than 10 years past the Ph.D.) in philosophy and theology, to be held in Los Angeles, CA in the summer of 2015.

For more information on these funding opportunities, together with instructions for submitting proposals and applications, please visit The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility at Saint Louis University.

The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility project complements the activities and research occurring under Templeton’s Science of Intellectual Humility project at Fuller University.

The project is directed by John Greco and Eleonore Stump, both at the Philosophy Department at Saint Louis University.

Reading Eleonore’s massive work on the problem of evil, and in the middle of her defense of the claim that there is something special about knowledge of persons. She calls it “Franciscan knowledge”. She begins her characterization by making remarks about analytic epistemology, contrasting knowledge-that, what she calls Dominican knowledge with Franciscan.

She begins by claiming that “it is axiomatic in analytic philosophy that all (or virtually all) knowledge is knowledge that something or other is the case.” (p. 48) A startling remark, one that I don’t recognize as true. The parenthetical phrase is footnoted, so I thought, “maybe the footnote will make sense of this,” but the footnote says that the qualification is needed because of Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance vs. knowledge by description. But that doesn’t help: it’s simply false that epistemology of the last 100 years assumes that knowledge is either by acquaintance or de dicto.

Explanation below the fold.
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The 2013 CSPA meeting, hosted by Oklahoma State University, will take place

October 4-5, 2013
Oklahoma State University, Tulsa Campus
Tulsa, OK 74106

Keynote Speaker: Professor Alison Jaggar (University of Colorado)

Colloquium papers in any area of philosophy are welcome. Submissions dealing with aspects of Profesor Jaggar’s work are encouraged. Papers are limited to 3,000 words. All submissions must be prepared for a blind review and include a word count fin addition to an abstract (not longer than 150 words).  Submissions should be sent by e-mail, using the subject heading “CSPA submission,” to me at s-goldberg@northwestern.edu. Responses to submissions will be sent by July 31, 2013.

The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2013.

Suggestions for commentators and session chairs (including self-nominations) are welcome.

Questions about local accommodations can be addressed to Professor Eric Reitan at [eric.reitan@okstate.edu].

Suggestions and questions regarding the program should be directed to me at s-goldberg@northwestern.edu

The fourth annual meeting of the Northwestern/Notre Dame (NU/ND) Graduate Epistemology conference is this Friday and Saturday, April 26-27, on the campus of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana).  The keynote will be given by Professor Tom Kelly (Princeton).  Details, including the program, can be found here.  I hope to see some of you there.