According to virtue epistemology, knowledge is a special kind of performance that a subject achieves through her cognitive capacity or virtue. On this view, what differentiates knowledge from beliefs that merely happen to be true is that the former mainly comes from the subject’s intellectual virtues, so that it is the subject herself who deserves credit for true beliefs. But Jennifer Lackey claims that testimonial knowledge raises a problem against virtue epistemology, because in the case of testimonial knowledge, it is (...) not the subject, but the person who gives testimony, who deserves credit. In this paper, I defend virtue epistemology against Lackey’s objections. The main idea is that even in the case of testimonial knowledge, the subject’s virtue is the most salient part of the causal explanation of the acquisition of the knowledge, when the normal condition of sincerity is presupposed. (shrink)

One reliabilist option against the problem of bootstrapping is to argue that circular reasoning is bad, but reliabilism can avoid circular reasoning. Vogel dismisses this option on the grounds that reliabilists need circular reasoning in order to circumvent skepticism. Briesen argues, however, that although reliabilists need circular reasoning to block second-order skepticism, they do not need it to block first-order skepticism. But I argue in this paper that reliabilists cannot legitimately reject first-order skepticism unless they can block second-order skepticism. In (...) particular, I argue that reliabilists cannot meet the non-undermining provision for justification unless they can somehow block second-order skepticism. (shrink)

According to the standard definition of time travel due to David Lewis, an object time travels if and only if the separation in time between departure and arrival does not equal the duration of its journey. After arguing that the standard definition of time travel is inadequate by discussing a world with circular time, I suggest a new definition of time travel that does not fail in situations involving circular time.

Some causal situations appear similar but causally different. Preemptive prevention offers such an example. However, it is difficult to capture the causal difference. In fact, it resists analysis. I discuss Collins’ s account of causal difference, and argue that it is not adequate. I also argue that the causal difference is not analyzable in terms of either dependence or production. I then examine some non-reductive account of causal difference, and claim that the sense of causal difference has yet to be (...) specified. Preemptive prevention shows that the concept of causation, whether it is reducible to something else or not, still requires some further scrutiny. (shrink)