Online research in philosophy

A brief discussion of the ways in which awareness of and sensitivity to the history of philosophy can contribute to epistemology even if epistemology is understood as a distinctively philosophical and not primarily historical enterprise.

Fundamental disagreements in epistemology arise from legitimate differences of interest, not genuine conflict. It is because of such differences that there are three varieties of epistemology: naturalistic, subjective, and what I shall call epistemology-as-logic. All three have been with us at least since Socrates. My chief concern will be with the third, but I must begin with the first and second, which constitute standard epistemology.

An ethics-based epistemology is necessary for environmental philosophy—a sharply different approach from the epistemology-based ethics that the field has inherited, mostly implicitly, from mainstream ethics. In this paper, we try to uncover this inherited epistemology and point toward an alternative. In section two, we outline a general contrast between an ethics-based epistemology and an epistemology-based ethics. In section three, we examine the relationship between ethics and epistemology in an ethics-based epistemology, drawing extensively on examples from indigenous cultures. We briefly explore several striking implications of an ethics-based epistemology in sections four and five.