Gonzalo Munévar

Gonzalo Munévar is Professor Emeritus at Lawrence Technological University.  He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley, under the direction of Paul K. Feyerabend.  He has served as Nebraska Foundation Professor of Philosophy (Omaha), Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Evergreen, and visiting Professor or Fellow at Stanford University, University of Newcastle (Australia), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid), Universitat Barcelona, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (U. of Edinburgh), Kobe Shodai (Japan), University of Washington, and U.C., Irvine.  He has done research in the epistemology of science, the philosophy of space exploration, evolution, and for the last several years has concentrated in experimental and theoretical neuroscience.  He has many publications in these areas, amongst them several books on science, including Radical Knowledge: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature and Limits of Science Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981; Evolution and the Naked Truth: A Darwinian Approach to Philosophy, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998; and Variaciones sobre Temas de Feyerabend; Cali: Programa Editorial, Universidad del Valle, 2006; as well as two novels:  The Master of Fate and Alex in Femiland. He has also edited several volumes, including Beyond Reason, Vol. 132 of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991; The Worst Enemy of Science? Essays on the Life and Thought of Paul Feyerabend., (with J. Preston and D. Lamb), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; and Sex, Reproduction and Darwinism (with F. de Sousa), London:  Pickering and Chatto, 2012.  He has just finished a book of poetry, Dark Prince: Poetic Tales of Unrequited Love, and is presently rewriting The Dimming of Starlight: The Philosophy of Space Exploration.  He is seeking funding for experiments on the neuroscience of consciousness and of bipolar disorder.

 

Issue: 8:1 (The twenty nineth issue)

Gettier’s Paradox is considered a most critical problem for the presumably
obvious philosophical view that knowledge is justified true belief. Such a view
of knowledge, however, exposes the poverty of analytic philosophy. It wrongly
assumes, for example, that knowledge must be conscious and explicit, and, to
make matters worse, linguistic, as illustrated in Donald Davidson’s writings.
To show why this philosophical view is wrong I will point to arguments by
Ruth Barcan Marcus and, principally, Paul Churchland, as well as to work by
the neuroscientist Paul Reber on intuitive knowledge. We will see, then, that
much of our knowledge is neither explicit nor conscious, let alone linguistic.
I will suggest that an approach that pays attention to biology is more likely to
succeed in developing a proper account of our cognitive abilities. Thus,
Gettier’s paradox becomes a mere curiosity.