Can We Acquire Knowledge of Ultimate Reality?

In Jeanine Diller & Asa Kasher (eds.), Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer. pp. 81-91 (2013)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Can humans acquire knowledge of ultimate reality, even significant or comprehensive knowledge? I argue that for all we know we can, and that is so whether ultimate reality is divine or non-divine. My strategy involves arguing that we are ignorant, in the sense of lacking public or shared knowledge, about which possibilities, if any, obtain for humans to acquire knowledge of ultimate reality. This follows from a deep feature of our epistemic situation—that our current psychology strongly constrains what we can conceive about the extent to which human intellectual and other psychological capacities might develop in the future. This mean that many possibilities for such development remain open to us epistemically, including the possibility that we might come to understand vastly more about ultimate reality than we currently do, even if ultimate reality is divine. I also argue that there is room to rationally hope that that is so.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-03-01

Downloads
184 (#98,128)

6 months
2 (#658,980)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Michael Antony
University of Haifa

References found in this work

Human Enhancement.Nick Bostrom & Julian Savulescu (eds.) - 2009 - Oxford University Press.
The elusive God: reorienting religious epistemology.Paul K. Moser - 2008 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

View all 13 references / Add more references