Abstract: This book presents the six Locke Lectures given in Oxford in May and June of 2005. They appear now very nearly as delivered; they argue for two levels of knowledge — the animal and the reflective — each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. Sceptics would deny us any such accomplishment, and the account of knowledge here is framed by confrontations with the two sceptics. A lecture on dream scepticism begins the volume, and one on the problem of the criterion ends it. The core positive account of knowledge is presented in the second lecture and developed further in the fifth. These two lectures detail how the account solves the problem of external world scepticism, and the sixth how it solves the problem of the criterion. In the middle lectures, the account is used to illuminate two central issues of epistemology: intuitions and their place in philosophy, in the third; and the nature of epistemic normativity, in the fourth. The lectures aim to present a kind of virtue epistemology in line with a tradition found in Aristotle, Aquinas, Reid, and especially Descartes (though none of these advocates it in all its parts), and to shine its light on varieties of skepticism, on the nature and status of intuitions, and on epistemic normativity.

Keywords: scepticism, animal-knowledge, reflective-knowledge, epistemic-normativity, epistemic-value