Salle 5, Site Marcelin Berthelot
En libre accès, dans la limite des places disponibles
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Conférence en anglais.

The lecture will develop and refine an analogy between knowledge and action (intentional doing). The general schema is: knowledge is to belief as action is to intention. The analogy reverses direction of fit: the former side should fit mind to world; the latter should fit world to mind. The knowledge/belief side of the analogy corresponds to the inputs to practical reasoning, the action/intention side to its output. Insofar as desire is an input to practical reasoning, it belongs to the former side (the desire-as-belief thesis is considered sympathetically). When all goes globally well with practical reasoning, one acts on what one knows. Beliefs play the same local role as knowledge, and intentions the same local role as action, in practical reasoning. This is the appropriate setting in which to understand knowledge norms for belief and practical reasoning. Marginalizing knowledge in epistemology is as perverse as marginalizing action in the philosophy of action.

Timothy Williamson

Timothy Williamson has been the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford since 2000. His main research interests are in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is the author of Identity and Discrimination (Blackwell 1990, updated edition 2013), Vagueness (Routledge 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford 2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Blackwell 2007), Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford 2013), Tetralogue (Oxford 2015) and about two hundred articles. Williamson on Knowledge, edited by Patrick Greenough and Duncan Pritchard (Oxford 2009) contains fifteen critical essays on his work and his replies. A similar volume, Williamson on Modality (Routledge), edited by Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, is also in preparation.

Intervenant(s)

Timothy Williamson

Université d'Oxford