I am thankful to the Leverhulme Trust for their support for the activities described on this page

Abstract:

The volume explores the variety within the broad class of knowledge, and the ways in which different forms of knowledge relate to the understanding. This includes considering distinctions between knowledge-that, knowledge-how, 'objectual' knowledge, understanding, etc., as well as distinctions within each of these classes. The collection will explore big-picture questions, such as what kind or kinds of unity there might be within the broad class of knowledge, and also much narrower questions, such as what is distinctive about certain kinds of knowledge, how the different kinds relate to each other, the different kinds of roles they play in our lives, and so on. The negative - and more polemical - point of the collection is to question the tendency of mainstream contemporary epistemology to try to shove the various (and what we might think are in fact very different) kinds of knowledge into a single mould, and the privileging of the propositional, speculative, theoretical etc., in doing so.

Contributors:

Anita Avramides; Lucy Campbell; Matt Duncan and Hannah Nahas; Naomi Eilan; Katalin Farkas; Kim Frost; Stephen Grimm; Matthias Haase; Nathan Hauthaler; Alison Hills; Michael Kremer; Eric Marcus; MM McCabe; Alan Millar; Eylem Ӧzaltun; Johannes Roessler; Devora Shapiro; Natalia Waights Hickman

Occasional talk series:

I will be hosting occasional online work-in-progress seminars. Some of these will be open to attend (the 'open sessions' below), although spaces will be limited. If you would like to attend an upcoming talk, please contact me at lucy.campbell@warwick.ac.uk, with 'FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE SEMINAR' in the subject-line (and note that space is limited). And keep an eye open for further talks, which will be advertised as and when I organise them, on Philos-L and through the Warwick Philosophy Department and the WMA twitters.

Schedule:

28th October 2021
3-4.30pm (UK time)

Matt Duncan and Hannah Nahas, "Getting Acquainted with Art" (open session)

Abstract: We learn from art. By viewing, hearing, touching, creating, performing, and in yet other ways interacting with art, we gain new knowledge—knowledge that we wouldn’t have had, and perhaps couldn’t have had, without encountering that art. That’s obvious. But what is less obvious is the nature, or structure, of this knowledge—what constitutes it. A standard assumption in contemporary analytic philosophy is that all knowledge is and must be propositional—that is, constituted by beliefs in propositions. However, this assumption, despite being standard, has come under attack in recent years. One front in this attack comes from aesthetics and philosophy of art, where some philosophers have claimed that some knowledge gained from art is non-propositional. In this paper we will fortify and expand this front by giving new reasons to think that some knowledge from art is indeed non-propositional and is instead “knowledge of things,” which is constituted, not by beliefs in propositions, but by awareness of properties and objects. We will also fill a gap in the contemporary literature by giving an account of this knowledge—of its nature, structure, and relation to other knowledge.