Epistemology 1 : General epistemology [ LFILO1190 ]

- Analyze thinking processes (conceiving, judging, reasoning).
- Examine the obstacles to knowledge (doubt, error, contradiction), and the means for overcoming these obstacles.
- Give an account of the main tendencies of epistemology (empiricism, rationalism, realism).

NB: We treat epistemology as a general theory of knowledge. Epistemology can also be considered as an introduction to other philosophy courses (metaphysics, anthropology, philosophy of nature, etc.).

By the end of the course, the students should:
be familiar with the basic concepts that come into play in a rational debate;
understand how a debate can aspire to the truth in a founded and critical manner;
have an idea of the many answers offered to the question: "what can I know?"

Volume 1 (course) : end of year oral examination. Students are required to recognise and explain a short extract from the texts which have been studied.

Volume 2 (exercises) : supervision : an assistant for the exercise classes and to supervise work in parallel with and closely connected to the lecture course. The work forms the subject of a separate assessment.

The final mark is awarded on the basis of the results from volume 1 (course) and volume 2 (exercises) in the following way :
Where one or both parts have been failed, the global mark is the weaker of the two.
Where both parts have been passed, the global mark is calculated according to an 80 (vol.1) / 20 (vol.2) weighting.

Although this is a lecture course, it will be fairly interactive and will often involve dialogue. (Certain lectures, such as the one on Kant, are more formal).

This course presents the different schools simply by following the chronological order in which they appeared and in such a way as to demonstrate the philosophical thinking in the way they succeeded each other. This internal development of the course means that we start with Plato and finish with different strands of 20^th century thought.  Each week students are required to read texts (between ten and thirty pages long) in preparation for the following week.

Aids : course notes, documents on iCampus