Volume 15, Number 2 · July 23, 1970
Rational American
By Anthony Quinton
The Philosophy of C.I. Lewis
edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp
The Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, 709 pp., $15.00
Values and Imperatives
by C.I. Lewis
Stanford, 201 pp., $7.50
Collected Papers of C.I. Lewis
edited by J. Goheen, edited by J. Mothershead
Stanford, 441 pp., $15.00
Analytic Philosophy of Knowledge
by Arthur C. Danto
Cambridge, 270 pp., $9.50
The Possibility of Altruism
by Thomas Nagel
Oxford, 148 pp., 30 shillings
What are epistemologists for? One conception of the role of the philosophical theorist of knowledge has a consoling quality. It appeals to the epistemologist by assigning him a reasonably dignified position, and to the generally interested public, which it sees as his clients, it has the merit of taking him to be socially useful. This is the conception of him as the professional guardian of the standards of rationality. Beliefs abound, reasons are adduced in support of them, claims to knowledge are advanced. The task of the epistemologist, on this view, is to act as an umpire who closely observes all this cognitive play and blows his whistle when the rules of justified belief are infringed.
Review, 7321 words
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