A collection of seminal papers written by eminent epistemologist and metaphysician Barry Stroud, published over the past 35 years. The main task Stroud explores in the essays is, as the title suggests, the one of understanding human knowledge as it is pursued in philosophy. Stroud defends the distinctive thesis that scepticism has a unique central place in epistemology in that it is to be regarded as a criterion both for posing the right kind of questions philosophical theories of knowledge face and for the postulation of answers to these questions. The second main theme of the book, equally i ... More

A collection of seminal papers written by eminent epistemologist and metaphysician Barry Stroud, published over the past 35 years. The main task Stroud explores in the essays is, as the title suggests, the one of understanding human knowledge as it is pursued in philosophy. Stroud defends the distinctive thesis that scepticism has a unique central place in epistemology in that it is to be regarded as a criterion both for posing the right kind of questions philosophical theories of knowledge face and for the postulation of answers to these questions. The second main theme of the book, equally intrinsically related to its overall target, is the possibility of the ‘transcendental’, broadly Kantian, project of establishing the distinctive perceptual and conceptual relationship between persons on the one hand and the world on the other. Stroud emphasizes the special invulnerability of certain aspects of our conception of the world that accompanies the conglomerate of these relationships.