Customer Reviews

Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology

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This book is a very clearly written introduction to its subject. It is committed to an analytical tradition though, and for those not familiar with its style it must appear a little hard. I myself have read it a couple of times and the first reading was a little troublesome to me. But as I picked it up again six months later I found it a pleasure and worth my efforts. The arguments are strict, compact and many.

This book is exactly what it claims to be: an introduction to the contemporary theory of knowledge (epistemology - what a great word!). Dancy presents an excellent - thorough and lucid - account of the problems connected with the nature of knowledge, how those problems have been approached and dealt with and the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches such as coherentism and foundationalism. This book, though it is certainly not a breezy novel, is well worth reading if you are a reasonably intelligent thinking person and want to understand how it is that we can know things and, more importantly, what it means to say that we know things or have knowledge.