New Books

I’ve recently taken delivery of a couple of books that are currently on my reading list. They are Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy (2007, Blackwell Publishing) and The Possibility of Knowledge by Quassim Cassam (2007, Oxford University Press).

The first of these has been recommended to me by several people and is based upon Williamson’s Brown University lectures on metaphilosophy (hence the title). As I’m still reading Williamson’s previous book, Knowledge and Its Limits, I’ll probably concentrate on finishing that one first before reading The Philosophy of Philosophy some time this summer.

The second is Cassam’s ‘multi-level’ account of how knowledge is possible—a topic that he touched upon in the last of the seminars I’ve been attending here at Warwick. Although I don’t know a great deal about it, the basic idea seems to be that we can only answer the question of how knowledge is possible by describing the means by which it may be attained; e.g. perception, self-knowledge, and so on. Throughout the seminars, Cassam spent quite a bit of time discussing Barry Stroud’s suggestion that epistemology should aim to explain how human knowledge is possible ‘all at once’, and whether such an explanation is possible or even desirable. It will be interesting to see how these ideas play out in the book and how it compares to Cassam’s recent papers on the subject.

Another book I bought a while ago and have been meaning to read for even longer is Alva Noë’s Action in Perception. I first came across Noë’s work while studying Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, from which Noë borrows a lot, and am very much looking forward to hearing him talk at the Susan Hurley Memorial Conference in Bristol later this month.