A.1 Epistemology

Start with Plato: the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic and the theory of recollection in the Meno, both concerned with the gap between appearance and knowledge. Move to the early modern split between rationalism and empiricism, Descartes' Meditations against Hume's Enquiry, then Kant's Prolegomena as an attempt to hold both together. Around 1100, five centuries before Descartes, al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error stages the same crisis: a first-person account of doubting the senses and then reason itself, written by a theologian who found his way back to certainty through mystical experience rather than argument. Read it alongside the Meditations. Classical Indian epistemology, the Nyaya school in particular, worked out a formal list of pramanas, the accepted sources of knowledge: perception, inference, comparison, and testimony. Treating testimony as genuine and irreducible, rather than a poor cousin of inference, is still a live position in analytic epistemology, worth holding up against Hume's suspicion of secondhand report. Zhuangzi's butterfly dream and his broader perspectivism, the question of whether any vantage point can be shown superior to another, belongs here too, as a skeptical challenge that resolves into neither Cartesian doubt nor Humean empiricism. Russell's Problems of Philosophy is the most readable entry point if the primary texts stall you, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on each thinker are reliable for orientation. For the modern starting point, read Edmund Gettier's three-page 1963 paper, which broke the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief.