Abstract

Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge is a treatise in epistemological foundationalism, and is thus in the general tradition of such works as Descarte's Meditations on First Philosophy and Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. ;I discuss in Chapter One Butchvarov's conception of the methods and primary tasks of philosophy in general and of epistemology in particular. My objective in this chapter is to decide whether Butchvarov's belief that philosophy is logically prior to science is intelligible and, if so, defensible. My decision is based largely on whether the traditional arguments he presents in support of the belief can withstand the assaults of a number of his contemporaries, particularly those of recent naturalistic, behavioristic philosophers . ;A study of The Concept of Knowledge proper commences in Chapter Two. I address there the question whether Butchvarov's theory of the nature of self-evidence discloses, as he claims, a guarantee of the truth of nonbasic beliefs. I also inquire whether he has successfully defended his more general view that a guarantee of the truth of what we claim to know is required if justification of our epistemic judgments is to be possible, that is, that we must adopt some version of foundationalism. ;Chapter Three addresses two questions: whether the concept of necessary truth can be made intelligible only if it is defined in a noncircular way; and whether Butchvarov's attempt to provide a noncircular definition of the concept results in an unintelligible theory of necessary truth. ;Chapter Four, finally, takes up the issue whether our beliefs about immediate perceptions can be said to constitute knowledge and thus be the primary epistemic basis from which it would at least be possible to derive knowledge of the existence and qualities of the material world