The Human a Priori
Essays on How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics
Description:... Part of the rationale for collecting these essays together is that they are all concerned, in one way or another, with the a priori. But there is a more fundamental and more distinctive unifying theme the essays all reckon, again in one way or another, with what I see as something ineliminably anthropocentric in our systematic pursuit of a priori sense-making.I shall not try to provide a precise definition of the a priori. Given the range of these essays, and given the extent to which their concern with the a priori is a matter of unspoken background presupposition rather than direct engagement, it suits my purposes to allow as much latitude as possible in how the term is to be understood. This includes latitude in how its very domain is to be understood: does the term apply to truths. to states of knowledge, to concepts, to modes of investigation. to justifications for what is believed possibly even to features of reality. It is largely to accommodate this latitude that I have elected, in this Introduction, to use the blanket term sense-making as the complement of a priori. For sense-making can itself be understood in a suitably wide variety of ways. And even if it does not capture all of what has been classified by philosophers as a priori, its own classification as a priori allows for extension to other cases for instance, a truth may be said to be a priori if it can be known as a result of a priori sense-making. All that really matters, for current purposes, is that if something can be classified as 'sense-making', and if it manages to do whatever it is intended to do independently of experience, then it can also be classified as a priori
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