Publisher's Synopsis
Over the last two decades foundationalism has been severely criticised. In response to this various alternatives to it have been advanced, notably coherentism. At the same time new versions of foundationalism were crafted, that were claimed to be immune to the earlier criticisms. This volume contains 12 papers in which various aspects of this dialectic are covered. A number of papers continue the trend to defend foundationalism, and foundationalism's commitment to basic beliefs and basic knowledge, against various attacks. Others aim to show that one important objection against coherentism, viz. that the notion of 'coherence' is too vague to be useful, can be countered. Next to these more general issues related to foundationalism, a number of papers deal with much more specific topics. First, various papers deal with mathematical knowledge, and with the problems attached to the idea of basic mathematical knowledge -- problems that derive in part from Benacerraf's work. Second, various papers deal with Plantinga's notion of 'properly basic belief', criticising it and at the same time proposing improvements on it. Finally there are papers that deal with the problems of basicality in moral knowledge, testimony, and proprioperception.
