Thinking with Assent

Epistemology is currently in ferment. Ever since Plato, the textbook story goes, knowledge has been conceived as justified true belief; but in 1963 Edmund Gettier blew a huge hole in this supposedly traditional account. Six decades later, however, ongoing attempts to identify the conditions which turn belief into knowledge continue to face counterexamples and charges of circularity. In response to this recurrent failure, leading philosophers have begun exploringalternative accounts of knowledge. This ground-breaking book pushes the revolt against post-Gettier epistemology in a radically new direction. It begins by challenging the crudehistory of philosophy underling the entire Gettier paradigm. A survey ranging from the pre-Socratics to the mid-twentieth century reveals that the allegedly 'standard' or 'traditional' analysis of knowledge is neither standard nor traditional. In fact, it is difficult to find major philosophers for thousands of years who regarded knowledge as a species of belief, or belief as entailed by knowledge. The standard view was rather that knowing and believing are distinct, mutually exclusive mentalstates, involving different mental faculties, and playing distinct and complementary roles in our cognitive lives. Having demolished the historical premise upon which the entireGettier paradigm rests, this book reframes elements of this age-old consensus in contemporary terms which push 'knowledge first' epistemology in a fresh direction. Knowledge, Antognazza argues, is phenomenologically and ontologically prior to belief, and, crucially, is not a kind of belief - not even

At her premature death in March 2023, Maria Rosa Antognazza was Professor of Philosophy at King's College London, member of the Academia Europaea, Trustee of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, and recently President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. Educated at the Catholic University of Milan, she held fellowships and visiting professorships in Italy, Germany, Israel,Scotland, England, Switzerland, and the USA. Renowned for her prize-winning intellectual biography of Leibniz, she was also a prominent exponent of the value to philosophy of the study of its history.

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