Critical notice: BonJour and Sosa on epistemic justification

Abstract

The latest instalment of the Blackwell Great Debates in Philosophy series is Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa's, Epistemic Justification: Internalism vs. Externalism, Foundations vs. Virtues. Like many of the books in this series, little philosophical background is presupposed, but the philosophical issues in question are broached in a manner that makes them of interest to specialists. In Part One, BonJour presents criticisms of externalist accounts of epistemic justification and of coherentism; he then goes on to defend his own version of internalist foundationalism. In Part Two, Sosa challenges the plausibility of internalist foundationalism, deals with the issue of scepticism and circularity in epistemic justification, and defends a virtue/reliablist based approach to epistemology. Part Three of the book contains the authors' replies to one another. Most of this paper will consist of a critical examination of Epistemic Justification. In his recent work, BonJour has (more or less) abandoned his coherence theory of empirical knowledge in favour of a foundationalist theory. He has embraced the given, something he was well known for arguing against. His work is part of a resurgence of interest in foundationalism. Some of the views he defends in Epistemic Justification