Abstract

The idea of a double-aspect approach to a philosophical conundrum is familiar in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and has been recently introduced as well into epistemology. As a class, double-aspect theories attempt, as it might be put, reconciliation by reorientation. Matter and mind, for double-aspect theorists, are not independent substances, whose co-presence in a single entity such as a human person might be deeply mysterious; they are different aspects of a single substance — a person in modest versions of the theory like Strawson's, the universe as a whole in Spinoza's more ambitious case. Similarly, according to Susan Haack, the epistemic justification of a belief of a given subject is not something conceptually isolated from a causal explanation of its presence, but rather epistemic justification has two aspects, a causal one concerned with what a subject's evidence for a belief is, and an evaluative one concerned with how good the subject's evidence is.