I explore the traditional contention that a priori epistemic warrants enjoy some sort of higher epistemic security than empirical warrants. By focusing on warrants that might plausibly be called 'basic', and by availing myself of an original taxonomy of epistemic defeaters, I defend a claim in the vicinity of the traditional contention. By discussing some examples, I argue that basic a priori warrants are immune to some sort of empirical defeaters, which I describe in detail. An important by-product of my investigation is a novel theory of epistemic defeaters, according to which only agents able to engage in higher-order epistemic thinking can suffer undermining defeat, while wholly unreflective agents can, in principle, suffer overriding defeat.

This dissertation examines the relations between philosophy and etymology in its broadest sense through an analysis of the different words for truth that, during the early history of philosophy, have given way to the singular concept of truth dominating philosophy: alētheia. By inspecting the fate of the related adjectives eteos, etumos, etētumos, the Democritean concept of eteē, the beginnings of etymology, the Socratic method of exetasis, and the repression and relatively recent reemergence of these a case is made for a more complex genealogy of philosophical truth, tightly related to the life of the philosopher and their capacity to speak truth. Through five examples, each representing a different strand of the etymological etymon, this dissertation reviews the rise of alētheia as philosophically dominant conception of truth in Ancient Greek epic and tragic literature and Socratic dialogues; the Democritean concept of eteē, its repression by Plato, and its rediscovery in the early work of Friedrich Nietzsche; the development etymology as a part of grammatical investigation, starting with Plato's Cratylus and its ancient reception; the Socratic method of exetasis and its brief afterlife in the theory of rhetorics; and finally the late lectures at the Collège de France of Michel Foucault, which offer a striking synthesis of the different themes lined out previously through his recapitulation of etumos logos and philosophy as a practice of parrhēsia. In conclusion, a short survey is given of the different post-Nietzschean approaches to the relation between philosophy and etymology – either through the development of etymological irreducibility in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, or through the complete evacuation of truth from philosophy by Alain Badiou. A final, preliminary proposal is made to open up the research presented in form of an etics.

The project examines the relationship between perception and action, and is divided into two parts. The first establishes a detailed philosophical critique of recent sensorimotor or enactive approaches to perception, targeting in particular the work of Alva Noë. In the second part I defend what may be called an 'action-space' account, according to which conscious experience is constituted by an agent's representing his surroundings in such a way as to enable a certain suite of actions. The enactive approach, I argue, misconstrues the relationship between perception and action and fails in its aim to provide an explanation of consciousness. It faces difficulties, too, when it comes to illusion, hallucination and non-visual perception. The action-space model, by contrast, drawing upon work by Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett and Philip Pettit, has the resources to provide a reductive, functionalist account of phenomenal consciousness; an account that locates consciousness where we want it - in the service of fluid world-engagement by embodied, active perceivers. Thus the perception/action interface is taken to be less direct than on the sensorimotor interpretation, but is nonetheless deep and important. The approach I endorse, furthermore, is consistent with and informed by empirical results from the cognitive sciences, including work on embodied, situated cognition and dual-streams analyses of visual processing.

This thesis argues for poietic hermeneutics as a work of gathering and re-siting which intervenes in the local material-discursive site. This is an interruptive tactic of the local church, seeking the flourishing of here through transitory, non-hegemonic acts of re-making. In developing this tactic I draw a critique of a practical theology discourse which, I argue, masks acts of making, with a consequent loss of attentiveness to materiality and a normative commitment to the development of practices internal to the church and the practitioner.

In this thesis, I am arguing for a single claim, namely that perceptual experiences are judgements, and I am arguing for it in a very specific way. This has not been a popular theory, although some have defended similar theories. One main reason that this has been a historically unpopular theory is to do with the problems of conflicting beliefs. I can see (strictly speaking, experience) the Müller-Lyer lines as being of different lengths, they look different lengths, and yet I know that they are the same length. Hence, I have explicit contradictory judgements on a judgement-theory of experiences. However, despite this being the major historical obstacle, two widely held theses in the philosophy of perception in recent times also stand as an impediment to this theory, namely the theses that experiences have a phenomenal character which individuates them from judgements, and that experiences, unlike judgements or beliefs, have non-conceptual content. I seek to offer an ''incremental defence'' of the judgement-theory of experiences by arguing in stages against the competing theories, and defending the judgement-theory from the objections that arise from the motivations for these other theories. As regards the phenomenal character of experience, I argue that once the representational theory is accepted, the path is open, should a range of individuating conceptual contents for experiences be found, to analyse the psychology of experience in terms of this content. I define this conceptual content, and then I motivate and defend the theory that experiences are judgements.

I defend the correspondence theory of truth, according to which a statement’s truth consists in a relation of correspondence with extralinguistic fact. There are well-known objections to this view, which I consider and rebut, and also important rival accounts, principal among which are so-called deflationist theories and epistemic theories. Epistemic theories relate the concept of truth to our state of knowledge, but fail, I argue, to respect the crucial distinction between a criterion of truth and the meaning of truth: the view that one cannot do semantics, or metaphysics, without addressing epistemic issues is rejected by this work. Against epistemic theories, I illustrate how truth is independent of epistemic considerations. Deflationism is the more popular of the rival accounts and has gained considerable momentum over the past two decades. It is therefore dealt with in greater detail by this work. Deflationist theories exploit the paradigmatic ‘“Snow is white” is true iff snow is white’ biconditional to argue for an insubstantialist account, according to which truth is conservative with respect to non-semantical facts. On this view, truth’s raison d’être is merely to perform the useful expressive function of generalising over possibly infinite sets of assertions. Against deflationist theories, I claim that the work done by Jeffrey Ketland and Stewart Shapiro conclusively demonstrates how truth is informationally additive over non-semantic facts, while deflationism itself is also an excessively impoverishing theory, inadequate to the tasks it purports to accomplish. This work also defends the thesis that Alfred Tarski’s well-known theory of truth is an authentic correspondence theory. To say this is to say that the clauses of a Tarskian truth-definition can be interpreted in terms of a relation of correspondence that holds between true sentences and the states of affairs they describe. I provide a precise account of what the correspondence in question consists in, claiming that true sentences are homomorphic images of facts, i.e. a true sentence represents, in a form-preserving manner, the truth-making facts in it. This gives precise expression to Wittgenstein’s thesis that true sentences picture the world.

It is important to have an adequate model of uncertainty, since decisions must be made before the uncertainty can be resolved. For instance, flood defenses must be designed before we know the future distribution of flood events. It is standardly assumed that probability theory offers the best model of uncertain information. I think there are reasons to be sceptical of this claim. I criticise some arguments for the claim that probability theory is the only adequate model of uncertainty. In particular I critique Dutch book arguments, representation theorems, and accuracy based arguments. Then I put forward my preferred model: imprecise probabilities. These are sets of probability measures. I offer several motivations for this model of uncertain belief, and suggest a number of interpretations of the framework. I also defend the model against some criticisms, including the so-called problem of dilation. I apply this framework to decision problems in the abstract. I discuss some decision rules from the literature including Levi's E-admissibility and the more permissive rule favoured by Walley, among others. I then point towards some applications to climate decisions. My conclusions are largely negative: decision making under such severe uncertainty is inevitably difficult. I finish with a case study of scientific uncertainty. Climate modellers attempt to offer probabilistic forecasts of future climate change. There is reason to be sceptical that the model probabilities offered really do reflect the chances of future climate change, at least at regional scales and long lead times. Indeed, scientific uncertainty is multi-dimensional, and difficult to quantify. I argue that probability theory is not an adequate representation of the kinds of severe uncertainty that arise in some areas in science. I claim that this requires that we look for a better framework for modelling uncertainty

Taking Savage's (1954) subjective expected utility theory as a starting point, this thesis distinguishes three types of uncertainty which are incompatible with Savage's theory for small worlds: ambiguity, option uncertainty and state space uncertainty. Under ambiguity agents cannot form a unique and additive probability function over the state space. Option uncertainty exists when agents cannot assign unique consequences to every state. Finally, state space uncertainty arises when the state space the agent constructs is not exhaustive, such that unforeseen contingencies can occur. Chapter 2 explains Savage's notions of small and large worlds, and shows that ambiguity, option and state space uncertainty are incompatible with the small world representation. The chapter examines whether it is possible to reduce these types of uncertainty to one another. Chapter 3 suggests a definition of objective ambiguity by extending Savage's framework to include an exogenous likelihood ranking over events. The definition allows for a precise distinction between ambiguity and ambiguity attitude. The chapter argues that under objective ambiguity, ambiguity aversion is normatively permissible. Chapter 4 gives a model of option uncertainty. Using the two weak assumptions that the status quo is not uncertain, and that agents are option uncertainty averse, we derive status quo bias, the empirical tendency for agents to choose the status quo over other available alternatives. The model can be seen as rationalising status quo bias. Chapter 5 gives an axiomatic characterisation and corresponding representation theorem for the priority heuristic, a heuristic which predicts binary decisions be- tween lotteries particularly well. The chapter analyses the normative implications of this descriptive model. Chapter 6 defends the pluralist view of decision theory this thesis assumes. The chapter discusses possible applications of the types of uncertainty defined in the thesis, and concludes.

This thesis defends the 'true-futurist' view, according to which statements about the future are either true or false, even if the future is open and unsettled in some robust, objective and mind-independent sense. A general argument for the validity of the principle of bivalence in the open future is advanced. The key feature of such argument is the 'principle of retrospective determinacy', stating that, for any proposition p, if it is now the case that p, then it was true that p would be the case. Different possible objections are discussed and dismissed. Second, two true-futurist theories are presented and shown to meet all the relevant desiderata of a true-futurist theory. In particular, much attention is devoted to the 'problem of counterfactual evaluation', concerning the truth-value of future-contingent statements in merely counterfactual scenarios. In addition, it is argued that that the choice between the two true-futurist theories depends upon which metaphysical picture of time is assumed as true. Some notable theoretical commitments of True-Futurism are examined. In particular, it is argued that True-Futurism is incompatible with two different ideas. The first one being that future-contingent statements (although bivalent) have an indefinite truth-value. The second one being that there are true 'counterfactuals of openness', stating that a certain future-contingent statement would have had a specific truth-value, had different circumstances obtained.

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