Gerald Bivens

Front Page

Definitions

Cartesian motifs

  1. The ontological dualism of mind and body
  2. The subjective individualism implicit in the appeal to direct personal verification
  3. The method of universal doubt that is supposed to lead us to incorrigible truths
  4. The conviction that unless we discover firm foundations for knowledge we cannot avoid epistemological skepticism
  5. The belief that knowledge of the world consists of having ideas that correctly represent and correspond to this world
  6. The doctrine that vagueness is “unreal” and that the epistemological endeavor is to know clearly and distinctly a completely determinate reality
  7. And, most fundamentally, that we can break out of language or systems of signs and have direct immediate knowledge of non-linguistic objects

"Analytic ideology" problems

  1. The problem of counterfactuals
  2. The mind-body problem
  3. Reductionism
  4. The logical character of verification and falsification
  5. The analytic-synthetic distinction
  6. The distinction between conceptual analysis and empirical investigation
  7. Reasons and causes
  8. And a few other related problems

Readings