I must thank my brother for his favorable review, but also correct an inaccuracy. I have never written on proof theory, as the...  Read More

I must thank my brother for his favorable review, but also correct an inaccuracy. I have never written on proof theory, as the phrase “Peirce’s theory of proof” suggests. He is referring to a paper I published on the proof of pragmatism. This proof was supposed to be given in Peirce’s “Lectures on Pragmatism,” but nobody could find such a proof in the “Lectures” and some Peirce scholars doubted that there was one. My paper unearthed the proof and set it out in explicitly stated premisses and conclusions. For some reason this nagging problem in Peirce scholarship suddenly became less pressing and the paper was virtually ignored. It is a difficult paper, so that may be a factor in its fate.The book is something else entirely. I strove to make it as simple as possible, so that people with very little knowledge of philosophy could read and understand it.My particular gripe with philosophy is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Analytic epistemology has been going nowhere for years for lack of (1) an explicit knowledge base that (2) can serve as an experiential check on theorizing and (3) a method that can be shown adequate to use the knowledge base as an experiential check. I aim to provide for that want in the book. When the subject of epistemology is taken as our truth-productive practices and their norms, then epistemology can be given an experiential basis without turning into sociology and many of its difficulties evaporate, revealed to be artifacts of the defective method presently employed that uses definitions and counter-examples.Philosophy students! Are you skeptical about skepticism? Do you find reliablism unreliable? Would you like a relevant alternative to relevant alternatives? Do you suspect that foundationalism is on shaky foundations? Do you find coherentism less than coherent? Do you need a context for understanding contextualism? Do you yearn for a counter-example to put an end to all counter-examples? Well, then, away with all the epistemological rubbish! This book is for you!Epistemology and related issues take up about sixty percent of the book. In the rest of the book I discuss other philosophical subjects. In particular, I provide the best account of universals on paper and a theory of free will that breaks the reasons-causes barrier. I proceed in these cases, as in epistemology, by finding ways to bring philosophical theories to the test of experience.Finally, if you buy the book I get $2.53. I can use the money and you won’t be disappointed.Special offer: I have applied the theory in the book to Fumerton’s Epistemology (Blackwell, 2006) to analyze how the standard epistemological theories go wrong that he presents. The interested student may obtain a copy by emailing me: fealsamh at outlook dot com. I will also supply a (very short) list of errata to anyone who wants it.  Read Less