For anyone teaching or learning epistemology at an introductory level at university, or doing it for the A and AS levels in the UK and in the International Baccalaureate, this book is an ideal starting point. The paperback is well‐printed and bound, and there is a hardback as well (costing £50.00 or US$59.95). Dan O’Brien draws on his experience as a teacher of philosophy at the University of Birmingham and the UK Open University, and has produced a modern, accessible, unpretentious, and practical examination of many of the key issues and areas. He has used a frame of reference – films and television programmes and everyday incidents – to illustrate his arguments, and follows these up with questions and further annotated readings at the end of every chapter.
The book wears its scholarship modestly, bringing in Hume at key stages like belief, inductive scepticism, and memory, Wittgenstein for resemblances in the theory of knowledge and the private language arguments associated with “other minds”, and Cartesian apriorism at appropriate points. Other scholars cluster – Gettier and Chomsky, Berkeley and Putnam, Dretske and Goldman – and above all Quine, whose ideas about belief and truth form the core of a perceptive chapter on “naturalized epistemology”(hard on the heels in the book of scepticism and induction).
Throughout, O’Brien drives the discussion with arguments – responses to induction like reliabilism and coherentism, problems encountered with perception and testimony, the “myth of the given” analysis of Sellars, and problems with utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. An early chapter sets the scene with the theory of knowledge – something likely to interest not just philosophy students but readers in the information and knowledge management fields as well, and things build up from there.
The overall structure of the book is convincing and clear, moving from knowledge and its sources to justification, and beyond that to scepticism and “areas of knowledge” (which here include memory, other minds, moral knowledge, and knowledge of God). Each of the last four topics is well‐covered in many other sources, but O’Brien is correct to cover them here in this tour of key issues. His method is to show through discussion, reasoning, and analysis, not only some of the main epistemological conundrums and views on them, but to do it in a way that gives readers the feeling that they themselves are philosophizing. In this way, it is a book likely to form a starting point for many on the road to more complex works like Sosa, Audi, Dancy, and others.
Close attention is given to that myth of the given, to Goodman's famous “grue” (there is an open‐ended way of explaining so‐called regularities in the world), and to Quine's critique of traditional epistemology, and this makes the book a good test of applied intelligence on the part of the student. The questions make it good for structured courses. The topical frame of cultural reference helps to bridge the gap with new readers: whether Ross in the sit‐com Friends is epistemological correct to say he will prove himself stronger than Chandler and “I’ll prove it like a theorem”, whether self‐deception is at work in Play Misty for Me, the Cartesian analysis of dreams and reality in The Matrix, and circular reasoning when we assert that Brazil is the best football team. We find these, in addition to the more conventional swans and bachelors that appear in many guides to philosophy. A book to recommend with confidence and one likely to travel easy throughout the Anglophone world.
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