I did an undergraduate degree in philosophy many years ago, but epistemology is one area I feel I didn’t get to study enough during my degree. I’m filling in that gap now with online learning materials.
I’m 3 hours into the 11-hour lecture series on epistemology published by The Great Courses. The lectures are by a philosophy professor from Lafayette College, who has 331 citations on Google Scholar.
So far, I’m impressed and satisfied with the lecture content. I particularly like the focus on contemporary analytic philosophy. I’ve had enough of ancient philosophy, pre-20th century philosophy, early 20th century philosophy, and continental philosophy for a lifetime.
In my undergraduate philosophy courses, we touched on some of the epistemological theories described in the Great Courses lectures. But one theory that is new to me, and quite intriguing, is process reliabilism:
The Great Courses charges an inordinate amount for individual courses. What they really want you to do is pay for their Great Courses Plus streaming subscription, which is a much better deal, assuming you finish watching or listening to the lectures in a timely fashion.
I’m actually listening to the audio-only version of the lectures available via Audible. This is a great option for people who have never had an Audible account before. You can do a free trial and get one item (audiobook or lecture series) for free. So, you could download this epistemology lecture series for free that way.
I subscribe to the Great Courses on Amazon Prime. Particularly worthwhile for Philosophy is David Kyle Johnson’s"Big Questions of Philosphy" The science courses are worth watching paricularly Don Lincoln (Theory of Everything) Sean Caroll(Many Worlds) and Gary Felder (Big Bang and Beyond). I might also mention on a personal note Massimo Pigliucci “How to be a Stoic”. All these maybe a tad secular in inclination.
Met process reliabilism I think 5 or 6 years ago. It’s an interesting idea. I wonder who thought of it; takes epistemology in a new direction and that might prove useful given that traditional epistemology is plagued by insolubilia and has a poor track record.
In 1979 Alvin Goldman published a paper entitled “What Is Justified Belief?”, which departed from several well-entrenched positions on the nature of epistemic justification. Years later, a number of epistemologists recognized this paper as marking a significant turning point, or “paradigm shift”, in epistemology. Michael Williams (2016: 3) called it “the Reliabilist Revolution”.
The article has more details on the history of reliabilism.
It’s an interesting idea, exploratory in spirit, but too hopeful for my taste. However, go for it! There are precedents in pharmacological stats e.g. nobody knows how paracetamol (tylenol) and general anesthetics work i.e. no biochemical mechanism has been found. We just know that these meds work and we’ve sorta figured out the quantitative aspects, allowing us to control the procedures in highly beneficial ways. The efficacy is proven statistically but the way these drugs work is an unsolved mystery, at least was a few decades ago (I haven’t been able to update my files).
If you like those ones, definitely try the ones on philosophy of science. It hits some similar themes, but I thought it was one of the better ones.
The one on mind body philosophy (basically philosophy of mind) by Patrick Grim out of Stoneybrook is one of the better one’s they’ve done.
Interestingly, there was another company called the Modern Scholar that did essentially the same thing. They have a better series on Plato and Aristotle than anything TGC put out though, and their stuff on classic literature was better on average I thought.
Also, Modern Scholar has stuff on Aquinas and the later Platonist tradition, whereas the Great Courses remains rather sparse on later antiquity and the Middle Ages (aside from Augustine, who they got Phil Cary for which is neat). There is also Learn 25. They seem to also do general history, science, and math, but I assume they are affiliated with a Catholic university or something because they have stuff on Lonergan, von Balthasar, etc. and more on Aquinas, the Franciscian tradition, the Dominicans, etc., and a lot of Catholic history. Those tend to be a bit shorter and more theological, but you cannot really divorce them so the Von Balthasar course has all his engagement with Plato, Ireneus of Lyon, Kant, Goethe, etc. I’ve only listened to a few of those though.
I found Great Courses to tend to have the best science material though.
They seem to have put those on Audible and Spotify now.
But the best listening resource I’ve found on that lacuna is the podcast Dogs with Torches (a reference to Saint Dominic) which gets a ton of great guests on and goes very in-depth and also gets less addressed figures like Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, Abelard, John of St. Thomas, Suarez, Cajetan, Dante, etc. That whole Renaissance scholastic scene, or the Byzantines, is normally invisible in a lot of academia even.
Thanks for the recommendations. I might check out the philosophy of science Great Courses. I did take a university course on philosophy of science, but it was not a great course. The professor barely lectured; it felt like he was phoning it in.
My personal interest these days is in analytic philosophy from within the last 50 years or so. In university, I studied a lot of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up to the early and mid 1900s. What I’m most curious about now, which I didn’t quite get enough of, is the more recent stuff.