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.

Ways of Knowing

I’m currently attending a series of seminars by Quassim Cassam entitled Knowledge and Explanation in which he is discussing (amongst other things) the relation between perceptual terms, like seeing, hearing, and so on, and knowing. Such terms are commonly referred to as ways of knowing, which is a phrase Cassam uses often—in fact, it’s the title of a paper he has written on the subject. Taken on its own, however, this phrase is ambiguous and could have either of the following two senses:

1. A way by which one arrives at a state of knowing.
2. A particular kind or class of knowledge.

Cassam, I take it, favours the first sense according to which, for example, seeing x a way in which we can get into the position of knowing x. Williamson, on the other hand, favours the second, since on his view a way of knowing is a determinate of the determinable ‘knowledge’. Williamson compares ways of knowing to colours in that everything which is some particular colour (i.e. way of knowing) is, ipso facto, coloured (cf. knowledge), and vice versa. Thus a way of knowing is just one particular form or class of knowledge, rather than a way of arriving at a state (i.e. knowledge) that is distinct from the way of knowing.