The Philosophy of Keith Lehrer: Essays on Knowledge, Consciousness, and Freedom

This book contains eighteen original essays engaging with Keith Lehrer’s contributions to philosophy. The first nine chapters focus on Lehrer’s work in epistemology and philosophy of mind. These chapters examine the role of meta-justification in Lehrer’s (and Thomas Reid’s) epistemology, explore the epistemological significance of self-trust and how to restore self-trust to victims of epistemic injustice, challenge Lehrer’s solution to the hard problem of consciousness, question Lehrer’s account of the basing relation, and discuss the important role that experience and exemplarization play in Lehrer’s coherence theory of justification and in philosophy of science more broadly.

The second nine chapters focus on Lehrer’s work on freedom and determinism. These chapters explore the nuances of Lehrer’s theory of ultimate freedom, discuss the role of power preferences in his account of free choice, explore whether free choices must be explained by power preferences, discuss Lehrer’s views on scientific explanation, explore his claim that freedom of choice is consistent with determinism, challenge his response to the consequence argument, explore whether choices explained by adaptive preferences are free, and investigate whether plural subjects can choose freely.

The book concludes with Lehrer’s masterful responses to each of the essays. Those interested in epistemology, philosophy of mind, freedom and moral responsibility, and the intersection of these fields should find the book of great interest.

Mylan Engel Jr. is Presidential Engagement Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University. He specializes in epistemology and ethics. His work in epistemology focuses on epistemic luck, the internalism/externalism debate, the lottery paradox, the regress problem, and the role of reason and coherence in justification. His work in ethics focuses on moral epistemology and on applied ethics (especially animal ethics, environmental ethics, and the philosophy of food). Representative publications in epistemology include: “Personal and Doxastic Justification in Epistemology,” Philosophical Studies; “Is Epistemic Luck Compatible with Knowledge?” Southern Journal of Philosophy; “Positism: The Unexplored Solution to the Epistemic Regress Problem,” Metaphilosophy; “Epistemic Luck,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; “What’s Wrong with Contextualism,” Erkenntnis; “Lotteries, Knowledge, and Inconsistent Belief,” Synthese; and “Coherentism and the Epistemic Justification of Moral Beliefs,” Southern Journal of Philosophy; “Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology,” Oxford Bibliographies; “Epistemology and the Ethics of Animal Experimentation,” in Applied Epistemology, ed. Jennifer Lackey; and “Evidence, Epistemic Luck, Reliability, and Knowledge,” Acta Analytica. He is co-editor of The Moral Rights of Animals (Lexington 2016) and co-author of The Philosophy of Animal Rights (Lantern 2010).

Joseph Campbell recently retired as Professor of Philosophy from Washington State University after teaching at WSU for twenty-six years. His interests include free will, moral responsibility, skepticism, and the philosophy of David Hume, and he is an acknowledged expert on the consequence argument for incompatibilism. Campbell is co-founder of the Northwest Philosophy Conference, and a former Program Chair and Program Committee Member of the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association. Publications include “A Compatibilist Theory of Alternative Possibilities,” Philosophical Studies; “Free Will and the Necessity of the Past,” Analysis; “Comptatibilist Alternatives,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy; “P. F. Strawson’s Free Will Naturalism,” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism; and “Keith Lehrer on Compatibilism” (co-written with Keith Lehrer), The Journal of Ethics. Campbell was also the recipient of two of WSU’s most prestigious teaching awards: the Marion E. Smith Faculty Achievement Award (2005) and the Honors Thesis Advisor Award (2006). This is his 10th co-edited volume.