Blackwell Reference Online

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Roderick Chisholm's work spans six decades and an impressive range of subjects. His books and articles on Brentano and Meinong, together with his work as a translator and editor, and as director of the Brentano Foundation, brought Anglo-American analytic philosophy back into contact with the riches of the Austrian philosophical tradition. He wrote several important papers on the foundations of ethics and axiology (e.g. Chisholm 1963, 1974). But Chisholm is best known for his many contributions to epistemology and metaphysics. The most important of Roderick Chisholm's writings on epistemology are Perceiving, The Foundations of Knowing , and the three editions of Theory of Knowledge . In these and in his other works, Chisholm addressed virtually every major problem in epistemology. At the heart of his epistemological system is a set of epistemic principles that are intended to generate intuitively plausible results about the degree to which various propositions are justified for an individual. The key to Chisholm's epistemology is understanding how these principles fit together and also understanding both their epistemological status (how is it that we can come to know them?) and their metaphysical status (are they necessary or contingent, and what is it that makes them true?). In formulating his epistemological principles, Chisholm presents a set of terms of epistemic appraisal, ... log in or subscribe to read full text