Acquaintance New Essays

Bertrand Russell famously distinguished between 'knowledge by acquaintance' and 'knowledge by description'. For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, many philosophers viewed the notion of acquaintance with suspicion, associating it with Russellian ideas that they would wish to reject. However in the past decade or two the concept has undergone a striking revival in mainstream 'analytic' philosophy--acquaintance is, it seems, respectable again. This volume showcases the great variety of topics in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language for which philosophers are currently employing the notion of acquaintance. It is the first collection of new essays devoted to the topic of acquaintance, featuring chapters from many of the world's leading experts in this area. Opening with an extensive introductory essay, which provides some historical background and summarizes the main debates and issues concerning acquaintance, the remaining thirteen contributions are grouped thematically into four sections: phenomenal consciousness, perceptual experience, reference, and epistemology.

1 - Consciousness is Acquaintance
2 - Natural Acquaintance
3 - What Acquaintance Teaches
4 - Betwixt Feeling and Thinking: Two-Level Accounts of Experience
5 - Acquaintance in an Experience of Perception-cum-Action
6 - Dreaming, Phenomenal Character and Acquaintance
7 - Relationalism, Berkeley's Puzzle and Phenomenological Externalism
8 - Conceptualism and the Explanatory Role of Experience
9 - Acquaintance as Grounded in Joint Attention
10 - Principles of Acquaintance
11 - Acquaintance: The Foundation of Knowledge and Thought
12 - Objectual Knowledge
13 - Visual Experience, Revelation and the Three Rs

Jonathan Knowles is Professor of Philosophy at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He has published books and papers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and pragmatism. He is particularly interested in questions about consciousness, naturalism, representation, and realism. Thomas Raleigh is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. He has previously held positions at the Ruhr University Bochum, the University of Vienna, the Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU), Concordia University, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His research is primarily in philosophy of mind and epistemology.