Quassim Cassam

The University of Warwick · Department of Philosophy

Current thinking about conspiracy theories is dominated by epistemological and psychological approaches. The former see the study of conspiracy theories as a branch of epistemology and insist that each theory should be judged on its evidential merits. On this account, a conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event which cites a conspiracy as a s...

This collective paper on radicalization and violent extremism part of the ‘Philosophy of education in a new key’ initiative by Educational Philosophy and Theory brings together some of the leading contemporary scholars writing on the most pressing epistemological, ethical, political and educational issues facing post-9/11 scholarship on radicalizat...

We don't know our own mental states and we don't have free will. These are Pelham et al.'s central claims in a nutshell. In principle, these two claims are independent: if one lacks free will because, say, all of one's actions are controlled by an evil demon, it's still possible for one to know that one believes it's Friday or that one wants a cup...

This book defends the view that epistemic vices are blameworthy or otherwise reprehensible character traits, attitudes, or ways of thinking that systematically obstruct the gaining, keeping, or sharing of knowledge. An account is given of specific epistemic vices and of the particular ways in which they get in the way of knowledge. Closed-mindednes...

This chapter discusses the view, associated with David Hume and Saul Kripke, that the supposed epistemic vice of dogmatism can play a positive role in protecting our knowledge. It discusses Kripke’s dogmatism paradox and Kuhn’s view that dogmatism can play a positive role in normal science. This chapter argues that the supposed epistemic benefits o...

This chapter explains and defends the distinction between blame and criticism and makes the case that epistemic vices can merit criticism even if they aren’t blameworthy. We are blameworthy for our epistemic vices only if they are epistemically harmful and we are, in the relevant sense, responsible for them. A distinction is drawn between responsib...

Judicial thinking in the Birmingham Six trials is used to illustrate the category of thinking vices, epistemically vicious ways of thinking that are distinct from character vices. Thinking that is epistemically vicious in some respect or other isn’t the exclusive preserve of thinkers with the corresponding character vice. There are vices of slow th...

This paper outlines and criticises two models of terrorism, the Rational Agent Model (RAM) and the Radicalisation Model (RAD). A different and more plausible conception of the turn to violence is proposed. The proposed account is Moderate Epistemic Particularism (MEP), an approach partly inspired by Karl Jaspers’ distinction between explanation and...

According to the overconfidence hypothesis (OH), physician overconfidence is a major factor contributing to diagnostic error in medicine. This article argues that OH can be read as offering a personal, a sub-personal or a systemic explanation of diagnostic error. It is argued that personal level overconfidence is an " epistemic vice ". The hypothes...

The Kantian project of investigating the necessary structure of experience presupposes answers to three questions: what is the purpose of such an investigation, what is the source of necessary features of experience, and by what means is it possible to establish the necessary structure of experience? This paper is a critical examination of Strawson...

Vice epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, identity, and epistemological significance of intellectual vices. Such vices include gullibility, dogmatism, prejudice, closed-mindedness, and negligence. These are intellectual character vices, that is, intellectual vices that are also character traits. I ask how the notion of an intellec...

There is widely assumed to be a fundamental epistemological asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others. They are said to be ’categorically different in kind and manner’ (Moran), and the existence of such an asymmetry is taken to be a primitive datum in accounts of the two kinds of knowledge. I argue that standard accounts of the diffe...

A familiar claim is that knowledge of our own thoughts, beliefs and other attitudes is normally immediate, that is, not normally based on observation, inference or evidence. One explanation of the possibility of immediate self-knowledge turns on the transparency of the question ‘Do I believe that P?’ to the question ‘Is it the case that P?’ This pa...

It seems that we have the conception of objects of experience as mind-independent. Berkeley argues that it is possible for us to have this conception only if it is made available to us by experience (the Explanatory Requirement) and that experience cannot make this conception available to us (the Experience Premise). John Campbell's response is to...

A familiar claim is that knowledge of our own thoughts, beliefs and other attitudes is normally immediate, that is, not normally based on observation, inference or evidence. One explanation of the possibility of immediate self-knowledge turns on the transparency of the question 'Do I believe that P?' to the question 'Is it the case that P?' This pa...

This article examines the concept of the so-called embodied self. It attempts to answer the metaphysical question about the relation between body and self, the phenomenological question about the nature of our awareness of our own body, and the epistemological question of whether anything is special about the knowledge we have of our own bodies. It...

Assuming that knowledge of our own beliefs is usually epistemically and psychologically immediate a natural question is: how is such immediate self-knowledge possible? I examine and criticize Richard Moran's response to this question and develop a different account. My alternative draws on the idea that immediate self-knowledge results from the ope...

In his Essay, John Locke proposes that what makes something a ‘body’ is its possession of primary qualities. What Locke describes in this context as a ‘body we might prefer to describe as a ‘material object’. In Locke’s sense of ‘body’, mountains and suitcases are bodies; sounds, holograms and shadows are not. The qualities which Locke identifies a...

In Knowledge and its Limits Timothy Williamson (2000) argues for what is called the Unanalysability Hypothesis (UH), the hypothesis that 'the concept knows cannot be analysed into more basic concepts'. Williamson puts forward a range of arguments in support of UH. The first is the Distinct Concepts Argument (DCA), which assumes that every standard...

I discuss the claim what makes self-knowledge epistemologically distinctive is the fact that it is baseless or groundless. I draw a distinction between evidential and explanatory baselessness and argue that self-knowledge is only baseless in the first of these senses. Since evidential baselessness is a relatively widespread phenomenon the evidentia...

What would a good answer to this question – call it (WK) – look like? What I’m going to call the standard analytic approach (SA) says that: (A) The way to answer WK is to analyse the concept of knowledge. (B) To analyse the concept of knowledge is to come up with noncircular necessary and sufficient conditions for someone to know that something is...

Barry Stroud suggests that when we want to explain a certain kind of knowledge philosophically we feel we must explain it on the basis of another, prior kind of knowledge that does not imply or presuppose any of the knowledge we are trying to explain. If we accept this epistemic priority requirement (EPR) we find that we cannot explain our knowledg...

An epistemological how-possible question asks how knowledge, or knowledge of some specific kind, is possible. The main contention of Duncan Pritchard‟s stimulating comments is that what I call „explanatory minimalism‟ appears to offer us just what we are seeking when we ask such a question. This looks like a problem for me given that I defend a ver...

My book is about how-possible questions in epistemology, questions of the form "How is knowledge of kind K possible?". I explain how such questions arise and propose a way of answering them. I suggest that epistemological how-possible questions are obstacle-dependent and that a satisfactory response to such questions must therefore be, at least in...

I focus on two questions: what is knowledge, and how is knowledge possible? The latter is an example of a how-possible question. I argue that how-possible questions are obstacle-dependent and that they need to be dealt with at three different levels, the level of means, of obstacle-removal, and of enabling conditions. At the first of these levels t...

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On an explanatory conception of ways of knowing, Φ-ing that P is a way of knowing that P just if it is possible satisfactorily to explain how S knows that P by pointing out that SΦs that P. This account of ways of knowing is shown to be preferable to various rival conceptions, including Williamson's conception in Knowledge and Its Limits. The expla...

This chapter argues that Evans was unsuccessful in his attempts to establish that in order to have the idea of an objective world one must also have the idea of a spatial world. It doubts his suggestion that the Kantian thesis cannot be defended without showing that the idea of space is implicitly involved in the very idea of existence unperceived....

Transcendental epistemology is an inquiry into conditions of human knowledge which reflect the structure of the human cognitive apparatus. The dependence thesis is the thesis that a proper investigation of such conditions must lean in important respects on the deliverances of science. I argue that Kant is right to object to the dependence thes...

According to the bodily awareness thesis (BAT), awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for the acquisition and possession of concepts of primary qualities such as force and shape. I discuss two arguments for this thesis. The acquisition argument for BAT focuses on the role of bodily sensation and action in the acquisition of the conce...

This collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke, resumes the current surge of interest in the proper explication of the notion of a priori. The authors discuss the relations of the a priori to the notions of definition, meaning, justification, and ontology, explore how the concept fi...

The thesis of this book is that it is a necessary condition of self‐consciousness that one is intuitively aware of oneself, qua subject, as a physical object. Intuitive awareness of oneself as a physical object involves various forms of bodily awareness in which one is presented to oneself, qua subject, as shaped, solid, and located. These forms of...

The thesis of this book is that it is a necessary condition of self‐consciousness that one is intuitively aware of oneself, qua subject, as a physical object. Intuitive awareness of oneself as a physical object involves various forms of bodily awareness in which one is presented to oneself, qua subject, as shaped, solid, and located. These forms of...

The thesis of this book is that it is a necessary condition of self‐consciousness that one is intuitively aware of oneself, qua subject, as a physical object. Intuitive awareness of oneself as a physical object involves various forms of bodily awareness in which one is presented to oneself, qua subject, as shaped, solid, and located. These forms of...

The thesis of this book is that it is a necessary condition of self‐consciousness that one is intuitively aware of oneself, qua subject, as a physical object. Intuitive awareness of oneself as a physical object involves various forms of bodily awareness in which one is presented to oneself, qua subject, as shaped, solid, and located. These forms of...

Soulevant la question des origines de la connaissance humaine dans le cadre des approches humaniste et universaliste de l'epistemologie, l'A. defend une position kantienne mediane entre l'humanisme et l'universalisme en ce qui concerne la philosophie de l'esprit et les conditions de la connaissance empirique: une position qui confronte l'humanisme...

La defense reductionniste de la these selon laquelle l'identite personnelle n'est pas d'une importance capitale depend pour une grande partie de sa plausibilite et de la conception visant a ne point faire de substances des personnes

Analyse de la notion d'argument transcendantal, comme specification des conditions necessaires d'une experience possible. L'A. montre que ce type d'argument en philosophie (chez Kant et chez d'autres auteurs) n'est pas lie a une forme de verificationnisme ni a une forme d'idealisme transcendantal

The terminology of ‘essence’ and ‘accident’, which it is customary to trace back to Aristotle, has been given a new lease of life by recent writing on logic and metaphysics. Aristotle's notion of ‘essence’ is notoriously difficult and obscure, but the works of Putnam1 on natural kinds, Kripke2 on naming and Wiggins3 on identity may be seen as provi...