This essay argues that Montaigne draws on elements of both the Academic and Pyrrhonian skeptical traditions, but that the fundamental desire for self-knowledge that initially led him to appreciate the insights of the ancient skeptics ultimately leads him beyond them. What lies at the heart of Montaigne’s skepticism is neither an epistemological position nor the experience of doubt, but rather the determination to philosophize self-consciously.

"Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in" (1.31.152, VS205).1 Remarks such as this from the essay "Of cannibals" have led commentators to argue that Montaigne subscribes to the theory of moral relativism, and that he takes "reason" to be a subjective, rather than an objective, standard for judgment.2 Yet (...) later in that same essay, Montaigne condemns the cannibals' brutal treatment of their enemies (1.31.155, VS209) and concludes that "we may call these people barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them .. (shrink)

In the essay “Of repentance,” Montaigne proclaims his moral autonomy, explaining to readers that he lives his life according to his own laws and that he judges himself in his own court. This essay attempts to give an account of the nature of Montaigne’s conception of autonomy, and ultimately argues that it deserves the attention of philosophers interested in alternatives to the conceptions of autonomy offered by figures from the history of philosophy such as Plato, Kant, and Rorty.

This article attempts to contribute to the literature on what has become known as “student relativism” by suggesting that in many cases it is a symptom of a broader and equally problematic pre-reflective epistemological framework that students often bring with them to the study of philosophy. It goes on to describe the notion of a “dialectical fact,” and to propose that this concept can be a useful pedagogical tool for helping students to progress beyond that framework.

This essay argues that Montaigne and Emerson share not only a literary style and a form of skepticism, but also a moral project, namely—to borrow a concept from Charles Taylor—the affirmation of ordinary life. Moreover, Montaigne and Emerson approach this project in fundamentally the same way: rather than offering readers discursive arguments, they attempt to reform readers’ imaginations. Finally, recognizing the poetic nature of their respective affirmations of ordinary life allows us to appreciate how their seemingly dogmatic claims regarding human (...) equality and the human good are compatible with their shared form of skepticism. (shrink)

Michel de Montaigne Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth century French essayist, is one of the most renowned literary and philosophical figures of the late Renaissance. The one book he wrote, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, is not a traditional work of philosophy. Having begun work on it around 1572, he published the first … Continue reading Montaigne, Michel de →.

Montaigne’s “Of friendship” is often read as a celebration of his relationship with his late friend, Étienne La Boétie. This is not wrong, but rather, incomplete. Drawing on the chapters of Montaigne’s Essays that immediately follow “Of friendship,” this essay argues that Montaigne’s chapter on friendship is part of a larger project in which he employs philosophical fictions—specifically, his “perfect friendship” with La Boétie and the “perfect society” that he depicts in “Of cannibals”—to reorient us in our relationships not only (...) with our friends, but also with our enemies. (shrink)

This essay argues that Montaigne’s deep appreciation for Plutarch is tied to a shared set of epistemological, metaphysical, and moral commitments that lie at the heart of both thinkers’ projects. Moreover, it contends that given Montaigne’s apparent appropriations of Plutarch’s ontological starting points, methods, and fundamental aims as a writer, the most fruitful approach to understanding Montaigne’s relationship with ancient Greek philosophy may well be one that focuses less on his engagement with Pyrrhonism and more on his engagement with Plutarch.

This book has two basic aims: to provide a clear and comprehensive account of the most prominent moral philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome, and to explain how for their adherents, these philosophies both motivated and constituted distinctive ways of life. Cooper succeeds admirably in achieving the first aim: he gives clear and concise accounts of the moral philosophies of Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Pyrrhonists, and the Platonists. Each chapter explores not only the basic theories of the (...) school in question, but also some lingering questions readers may have about those theories’ implications. Cooper aims for his book to be both accessible to readers with little formal .. (shrink)

Montaigne is widely appreciated as an important figure in the history of skepticism, but the precise nature of his skepticism remains unclear. While most treatments of Montaigne’s skepticism focus on the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” there is reason to believe that the “Apology” does not contain his last word on the subject, and that—as many scholars have pointed out—whatever endorsement he gives there to ancient Pyrrhonism must be qualified in light of the fact that he does maintain beliefs, not only (...) about appearances, but also about reality itself. This essay argues that by the end of the Essais, Montaigne has developed a skepticism that is, as he would say, “all his own,” one that is best understood as a therapeutic practice meant to treat what Montaigne calls our “natural and original malady.”. (shrink)

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a leading brain researcher show how the brain creates conscious experience.

The article provides a commentary on the Second Treatise of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, entitled '"Guilt, "Bad Conscience," and Related Matters'. The Treatise's central train of thought is that having a bad conscience or feeling guilty is a way in which we satisfy a fundamental need to inflict cruelty. This is achieved by turning the exercise of cruelty inwards, upon the self rather than others, and by interpreting such a cruelty as a legitimate form of punishment of oneself.

Shanahan’s eloquently argued version of the global workspace theory fits well into the emerging understanding of consciousness as a computational phenomenon. His disinclination toward metaphysics notwithstanding, Shanahan’s book can also be seen as supportive of a particular metaphysical stance on consciousness — the computational identity theory.

Intelligent systems are faced with the problem of securing a principled (ideally, veridical) relationship between the world and its internal representation. I propose a unified approach to visual representation, addressing both the needs of superordinate and basic-level categorization and of identification of specific instances of familiar categories. According to the proposed theory, a shape is represented by its similarity to a number of reference shapes, measured in a high-dimensional space of elementary features. This amounts to embedding the stimulus in a (...) low-dimensional proximal shape space. That space turns out to support representation of distal shape similarities which is veridical in the sense of Shepard's (1968) notion of second-order isomorphism (i.e., correspondence between distal and proximal similarities among shapes, rather than between distal shapes and their proximal representations). Furthermore, a general expression for similarity between two stimuli, based on comparisons to reference shapes, can be used to derive models of perceived similarity ranging from continuous, symmetric, and hierarchical, as in the multidimensional scaling models (Shepard, 1980), to discrete and non-hierarchical, as in the general contrast models (Tversky, 1977; Shepard and Arabie, 1979). (shrink)

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity-a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can (...) seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of "the queer," the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education's response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan's "ab-sens" and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodovar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory's engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing. (shrink)

Short essays that touch many topics-anxiety, consciousness, death, happiness, morality, stupidity, & truth-that make the case for realism & help set expectations with regard to the human condition.

The only viable formulation of perception, thinking, and action under uncertainty is statistical inference, and the normative way of statistical inference is Bayesian. No wonder, then, that even seemingly non-Bayesian computational frameworks in cognitive science ultimately draw their justification from Bayesian considerations, as enlightened theorists know fully well.

L'homme des droits de l'homme eut une belle vie, pleine de bruit et de fureur, mais aujourd'hui, il n'est plus. En lieu et place a surgi un nouvel homme, égoïste, hédoniste, à la recherche de son seul plaisir ; sa préoccupation première, essentielle, c'est l'amour de soi, l'émerveillement de soi, la satisfaction de soi, et l'Etat est sommé d'y satisfaire. Car l'Etat n'est plus ce tyran féroce, avide de pouvoir, ce despote aux aguets qui attend l'occasion pour soumettre ces sujets (...) ; il ne fait plus vraiment peur ; il a été assagi, apprivoisé et sa fonction est de gérer un nouveau pacte social : non plus de faire respecter la liberté de tous mais celle de chacun ; non plus d'établir l'égalité pour tous mais pour chacun ; non plus de protéger un «moi commun», une nation, une collectivité, mais un moi individuel ; les hommes ne se sont pas réunis pour leur sécurité et leur conservation, mais pour mieux jouir les uns des autres. (shrink)

This study takes inquiry as the starting point for epistemological theorising. It uses this idea to develop new and systematic answers to some of the most fundamental questions in epistemology, including about the nature of core epistemic phenomena as well as their value and the extent to which we possess them.

L'utopie des posthumains est a notre porte. A nous, qui ne croyons plus aux lendemains qui chantent, elle promet que demain nous entrerons dans une nouvelle ere. Nous aurons dit adieu a notre miserable condition humaine: nous vivrons dans un monde a la mesure de notre demesure, habite par des surhommes technologiques, a la fois humains et machines, oscillant entre une realite reelle et virtuelle, immortels dans l'ignorance du temps, vivants dans l'ignorance de la vie. Depasser la condition humaine - (...) vaincre la mort et conquerir la vie eternelle - semble une quete ancestrale de l'humanite. Que vivrait ce nouvel homme dans ce rien eternel, dans ce non-temps, lui qui n'aurait rien a gagner, rien a aimer ni hair, rien a regretter, rien a pleurer, rien a esperer? Reprenant les grandes analyses sur l'immortalite, depuis le paradis perdu jusqu'a l'humanite augmentee, Bernard Edelman s'interroge sur ce qui donne sens a la vie. (shrink)

The coherence objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that it is impossible for one individual to have both the attributes of God and the attributes of a human being. This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s answer to this objection. I challenge the dominant, mereological interpretation of Aquinas’s position and, in light of this challenge, develop and defend a new alternative interpretation of Aquinas’s response to this important objection to Christian doctrine.

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It is this function that supports (...) a central norm of assertion according to which a good assertion is one that has the disposition to generate knowledge in others. The book uses this functionalist approach to motivate further norms of assertion on both the speaker and the hearer side and investigates ramifications of this view for other questions about assertion. (shrink)

The idea for this collection of essays arose out of conversations I had with D. Z. Phillips in Claremont in 2000: a set of philosophical essays recognizing and arising out of something I took to be both interesting and good going on at University College, Swansea, roughly from the 1950s into the 1990s. I envisioned eight essays, each in some way taking up the work of one of eight individuals - Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, R. F. Holland, J. R. Jones, (...) H. O. Mounce, D. Z. Phillips, Ilham Dilman, and R. W. Beardsmore - each of whom taught at Swansea for a substantial period during those years, these being followed by a ninth essay providing something of an overview of the other eight essays and thereby of philosophy at Swansea during the same period. (shrink)

Highlights of a difficult history -- The preliminary identification of our topic -- Approaches -- Bradley's protest -- James's disjunctive theory -- The source of Bradley's dissatisfaction -- Behaviourism and after -- Heirs of Bradley in the twentieth century -- The underlying metaphysical issue -- Explanatory tactics -- The basic distinction -- Metaphysical categories and taxonomies -- Adverbialism, multiple realizability, and natural kinds -- Adverbialism and levels of explanation -- Taxonomies and supervenience relations -- Rejecting the process : first view (...) -- Supervenience-failure -- The modal commitments of the process : first view -- The interference argument : a putative problem for adverbialist accounts -- Cognitive unison -- The problem with attitude based adverbialism -- Gilbert Ryle and Alan White -- White's argument against disposition-based adverbialism -- The cognitive unison theory -- Tasks -- Cognitive processes -- Potential service of a task -- Superordinate tasks -- Some features of the theory -- Divided attention -- Degrees of attention and merely partial attention -- The causal life of attention -- Mental causation -- How to respond to mental causation objections -- The causal role of attention -- Attention as an enabling condition -- Counterfactuals -- The causal relevance of attention per se -- Counterfactuals and causally relevant properties -- Objections to counterfactual analysis of causation and of causal relevance -- The extrinsicness of unison -- The privative character of unison and the problem of absence causation -- Causal exclusion -- Consequences for cognitive psychology -- Psychology and metaphysics -- The metaphysical commitments of the process-identifying project -- The diverse explanatory construals of current psychological results -- Reasons for deflation -- Inductively unreliable properties -- Questions without answers -- The positive payoff -- Philosophical work for the theory of attention -- Putting attention to philosophical work -- Attention and reference -- Attention and consciousness -- Prospects for optimism. (shrink)

The ethics of autonomous cars and automated driving have been a subject of discussion in research for a number of years :28–58, 2016). As levels of automation progress, with partially automated driving already becoming standard in new cars from a number of manufacturers, the question of ethical and legal standards becomes virulent. For exam-ple, while automated and autonomous cars, being equipped with appropriate detection sensors, processors, and intelligent mapping material, have a chance of being much safer than human-driven cars in (...) many regards, situations will arise in which accidents cannot be completely avoided. Such situations will have to be dealt with when programming the software of these vehicles. In several instances, internationally, regulations have been passed, based on legal considerations of road safety, mostly. However, to date, there have been few, if any, cases of a broader ethics code for autonomous or automated driving preceding actual regulation and being based on a broadly composed ethics committee of independent experts. In July 2016, the German Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, Alexander Dobrindt, appointed a national ethics committee for automated and connected driving, which began its work in September 2016. In June 2017, this committee presented a code of ethics which was published in German and in English. It consists of 20 ethical guidelines. Having been a member of this committee, I will present the main ethical topics of these guidelines and the discussions that lay behind them. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and (...) I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.

Suppose you ask yourself whether your father's record collection includes a certain recording of The Trout and venture to find out. At that time, you embark on an inquiry into whether your father owns the relevant recording. Your inquiry is a project with a specific goal: finding out whether your father owns the recording. This fact about your inquiry generalizes: inquiry is a goal-directed enterprise. A specific inquiry can be individuated by the question it aims to answer and by who (...) aims to answer the question. Your inquiry into whether your father owns the recording differs from your inquiry into how many records your father owns because different questions are being asked. Your inquiry into whether your father owns the recording differs from my inquiry into whether he does because different people are inquiring. The goal of inquiry into a given question by an agent, α, can be characterized, neutrally, as α's having the answer to that question. I will here focus only on inquiries into whether questions and characterize the goal of inquiry into whether φ by α as α's having the answer to the question whether φ. (shrink)

This paper is built around a single, simple idea. It is widely agreed that there is a distinctive kind of awareness each of us has of his own bodily actions. This action-awareness is different from any perceptual awareness a subject may have of his own actions; it can exist in the absence of such perceptual awareness. The single, simple idea around which this paper is built is that the distinctive awareness that subjects have of their own mental actions is a (...) form of action-awareness. Subjects’ awareness of their own mental actions is a species of the same genus that also includes the distinctive awareness of bodily actions. More specifically, I claim. (shrink)

Christopher Hookway presents a series of essays on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1913), the 'founder of pragmatism' and one of the most important and original American philosophers.

Having laid the groundwork in his critically acclaimed books Neural Darwinism (Basic Books, 1987) and Topobiology (Basic Books, 1988), Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman now proposes a comprehensive theory of consciousness in The Remembered ...

The author takes the reader on a tour that covers such topics as computers, evolution, Descartes, Schrodinger, and the nature of perception, language, and invididuality. He argues that biology provides the key to understanding the brain. Underlying his argument is the evolutionary view that the mind arose at a definite time in history. This book ponders connections between psychology and physics, medicine, philosophy, and more. Frequently contentious, Edelman attacks cognitive and behavioral approaches, which leave biology out of the picture, (...) as well as the currently fashionable view of the brain as a computer. (shrink)

How does good combine with bad? Most creatures are neither so blessed as to only enjoy good nor so cursed as to only suffer bad. Rather, the good and bad they receive throughout their lives combine to produce their overall quality of life. But it’s not just whole lives that have combined good and bad. Many stretches within contain both positive and negative occurrences whose value is joined to form the overall quality of that span of time. In a single (...) morning someone might wake up, brush their teeth, stub their toe groggily lumbering down the stairs, and have a sip of coffee that’s tasty but so hot they burn their tongue. These events are good and bad for them to various degrees, and their value comes together to form an overall value for them of that morning. A single moment, even, can have combined value from distinct pockets of good and bad that occur simultaneously. The tastiness of the coffee is good, but the pain of the heat is bad. They combine to form an overall value of the sipping moment – negative if the pain outweighed the flavor. Thus, wellbeing and illbeing combine. But how? How can someone rightly chastise themselves for sipping the overly hot coffee when it was, in fact, good because it was tasty? To pose the question starkly, a life can be bad, even so bad to not be worth living, and yet it can have many instances of good, where these goods are, in themselves, pure of any negativity. But how can good make something bad? (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously defended two theses that have fallen rather dramatically out of fashion. The first is that intensions are “creatures of darkness” that ultimately have no place in respectable philosophical circles, owing primarily to their lack of rigorous identity conditions. However, although he was thoroughly familiar with Carnap’s foundational studies in what would become known as possible world semantics, it likely wouldn’t yet have been apparent to Quine that he was fighting a losing battle against intensions, due in (...) large measure to developments stemming from Carnap’s studies and culminating in the work of Kripke, Hintikka, and Bayart. These developments undermined Quine’s crusade against intensions on two fronts. First, in the context of possible world semantics, intensions could after all be given rigorous identity conditions by defining them (in the simplest case) as functions from worlds to appropriate extensions, a fact exploited to powerful and influential effect in logic and linguistics by the likes of Kaplan, Montague, Lewis, and Cresswell. Second, the rise of possible world semantics fueled a strong resurgence of metaphysics in contemporary analytic philosophy that saw properties and propositions widely, fruitfully, and unabashedly adopted as ontological primitives in their own right. This resurgence — happily, in my view — continues into the present day. -/- For a time, at any rate, Quine experienced somewhat better success with his second thesis: that higher-order logic is, at worst, confused and, at best, a quirky notational alternative to standard first-order logic. However, Quine notwithstanding, a great deal of recent work in formal metaphysics transpires in a higher-order logical framework in which properties and propositions fall into an infinite hierarchy of types of (at least) every finite order. Initially, the most philosophically compelling reason for embracing such a framework since Russell first proposed his simple theory of types was simply that it provides a relatively natural explanation of the paradoxes. However, since the seminal work of Prior there has been a growing trend to consider higher-order logic to be the most philosophically natural framework for metaphysical inquiry, many of the contributors to this volume being among the most important and influential advocates of this view. Indeed, this is now quite arguably the dominant view among formal metaphysicians. -/- In this paper, and against the current tide, I will argue in §1 that there are still good reasons to think that Quine’s second battle is not yet lost and that the correct framework for logic is first-order and type-free — properties and propositions, logically speaking, are just individuals among others in a single domain of quantification — and that it arises naturally out of our most basic logical and semantical intuitions. The data I will draw upon are not new and are well-known to contemporary higher-order metaphysicians. However, I will try to defend my thesis in what I believe is a novel way by suggesting that these basic intuitions ground a reasonable distinction between “pure” logic and non-logical theory, and that Russell-style semantic paradoxes of truth and exemplification arise only when we move beyond the purely logical and, hence, do not of themselves provide any strong objection to a type-free conception of properties and propositions. -/- Most of my arguments in §1 are largely independent of any specific account of the nature of properties and propositions beyond their type-freedom. However, I will in addition argue that there are good reasons to take propositions, at least, to be very fine-grained. My arguments are thus bolstered significantly if it can be shown that there are in fact well-defined examples of logics that are not only type-free but which comport with such a conception of propositions. It is the purpose of §2 to lay out a logic of this sort in some detail, drawing especially upon work by George Bealer and related work of my own. With the logic in place, it will be possible to generalize the line of argument noted above regarding Russell-style paradoxes and, in §3, apply it to two propositional paradoxes — the Prior-Kaplan paradox and the Russell-Myhill paradox — that are often taken to threaten the sort of account developed here. (shrink)

A number of cases involving self-locating beliefs have been discussed in the Bayesian literature. I suggest that many of these cases, such as the sleeping beauty case, are entangled with issues that are independent of self-locating beliefs per se. In light of this, I propose a division of labor: we should address each of these issues separately before we try to provide a comprehensive account of belief updating. By way of example, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order (...) to accommodate these issues. Then, putting these other issues aside, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order to accommodate self-locating beliefs. Finally, I propose a constraint on updating rules, the "Learning Principle", which rules out certain kinds of troubling belief changes, and I use this principle to assess some of the available options. (shrink)

The brains of higher mammals are extraordinary integrative devices. Signals from large numbers of functionally specialized groups of neurons distributed over many brain regions are integrated to generate a coherent, multimodal scene. Signals from the environment are integrated with ongoing, patterned neural activity that provides them with a meaningful context. We review recent advances in neurophysiology and neuroimaging that are beginning to reveal the neural mechanisms of integration. In addition, we discuss concepts and measures derived from information theory that lend (...) a theoretical basis to the notion of complexity as integration of information and suggest new experimental tests of these concepts. (shrink)

Forms and Concepts is the first comprehensive study of the central role of concepts and concept acquisition in the Platonic tradition. It sets up a stimulating dialogue between Plato s innatist approach and Aristotle s much more empirical response. The primary aim is to analyze and assess the strategies with which Platonists responded to Aristotle s (and Alexander of Aphrodisias ) rival theory. The monograph culminates in a careful reconstruction of the elaborate attempt undertaken by the Neoplatonist Proclus (6th century (...) AD) to devise a systematic Platonic theory of concept acquisition.". (shrink)

A critical interrogation of elements of Hobbes's political and natural philosophy and its capacity to enrich our understanding of the natural of democratic life.

In this paper, I aim to develop a novel virtue reliabilist account of justified belief, which incorporates insights from both process reliabilism and extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Like extant virtue reliabilist accounts of justi- fied belief, the proposed view takes it that justified belief is a kind of competent performance and that competent performances require reliable agent abilities. However, unlike extant versions of virtue reliabilism, the view takes abilities to essentially involve reliable processes. In this way, the proposed takes (...) a leaf from process reliabilism. Finally, I will provide reason to believe that the view compares favourably with both extant versions of virtue reliabilism and process reliabilism. In particular, I will show that in taking abilities to essentially involve reliable processes, the view has an edge over extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Moreover, I will argue that the proposed view can either solve or defuse a number of classical problems of process reliabilism, including the new evil demon problem, the problem of clairvoyant cases and the generality problem. (shrink)

Essentialists claim that at least some individuals or kinds have essences. This raises an important but little-discussed question: how do we come to know what the essence of something is? This paper examines Aristotle’s answer to this question. One influential interpretation (viz., the Explanationist Interpretation) is carefully expounded, criticized, and then refined. Particular attention is given to what Aristotle says about this issue in DA I.1, APo II.2, and APo II.8. It is argued that the epistemological claim put forward in (...) DA I.1 differs from that put forward in APo II.2 and II.8, contrary to what has been claimed by Explanationists, and that each of these distinct epistemological claims rests on a distinct non-epistemological thesis about essence. Consequently, an ‘Enriched Explanationist Interpretation’ is developed which takes into account both of the aforementioned elements in Aristotle’s epistemology of essence. The paper concludes by highlighting an insight the preceding exegetical discussion offers to contemporary essentialists seeking to explain how we come to know what something’s essence is. (shrink)