Empiricism and Experience

Reviews / Votes

How do our perceptual experiences serve as reasons for our beliefs about the world around us? Many philosophers have addressed this question, but Anil Gupta's profound, sophisticated, and imaginative new book raises the bar for all future discussion. It deserves to have an agenda-setting impact on the epistemology of perception. * Ram Neta, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * Empiricism and Experience develops an original, ambitious, and radical view of how experience, together with a background view, can justify perceptual beliefs. The theory is developed in a large-scale argument that is elaborated through the MS. The theory draws at crucial points on the author's (and Belnap's) theory of interdependent definitions. The issues addressed are absolutely fundamental issues in philosophy. The writing, as is to be expected from the author's previous contributions, is lucid, highly readable, and often witty. Many important insights, independent of the main argument, are developed along the way. The work also displays a broad historical perspective: it effectively locates the author's position in relation to classical empiricists, and to such twentieth-century figures as Davidson, Sellars and Quine. * Christopher Peacocke, Columbia University * The analytical apparatus [this book] develops is worked out in considerable detail and it is rich in engagements with key figures in the literature including Quine and Sellars. * Alan Millar, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *