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Paul Silva Jr., Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 2023, 208pp., $98.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192869548.
Reviewed by Ted Poston, University of Alabama
What is the relation between knowledge and factual awareness? Timothy Williamson defends the claim that knowing is the most general factive stative attitude (Williamson 2000, 34). In this book, Paul Silva Jr argues that factive awareness is the most general factive stative attitude and that knowledge is but a species of the genus of factual awareness. Silva defends:
The Generality of Awareness (GA): Factual awareness is a genus of which knowledge is but one species (7).
Silva’s book is ambitious, aiming to reconceive the relationship between awareness and knowledge, and in doing so to offer a reductive analysis of knowledge. Along the way, he provides many interesting arguments related to the possession of reasons, the normativity of knowledge, virtue epistemology, and anti-luck epistemology…
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