Concept
Knowledge
Overview
awareness of facts, familiarity with individuals and situations, or practical skill; encompasses descriptive, procedural, and acquaintance knowledge, typically characterized as justified true belief distinct from opinion or guesswork
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Knowledge is discussed.
The chief importance of knowledge by description is that it enables us to pass beyond the limits of our private experience. In spite of the fact that we can only know truths which are wholly composed of terms which we have experienced in acquaintance, we can yet have knowledge by description of things which we have never experienced. In view of the very narrow range of our immediate experience, this result is vital…
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
What is known, in a given case, is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think with rather than that which we think about. In its honorable sense, knowledge is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and not dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is difference between intellectual certainty…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Knowledge of this kind is called à priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources à posteriori, that is, in experience.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Knowledge, in fine, may be regarded as an ascending series of four terms. The first is constituted by sensations associated together in such a way that a relation of antecedence and consequence exists between them.
John Dewey, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
There are of KNOWLEDGE two kinds; whereof one is Knowledge Of Fact: the other Knowledge Of The Consequence Of One Affirmation To Another. The former is nothing else, but Sense and Memory, and is Absolute Knowledge; as when we see a Fact doing, or remember it done: And this is the Knowledge required in a Witnesse.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Knowledge
- Bernard Lonergan
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)
- Heinrich Rickert
- Theodorus the Atheist
- Immanuel Kant
- John Locke
- Xenocrates
- Nicolas Malebranche
- Al-Farabi
- Leucippus
- Johann Friedrich Herbart
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Edmund Gettier
- David Malet Armstrong
- T. H. Green
- Xenophanes
- Plato
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Jaegwon Kim
- Robert Nozick
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Charles Taylor (philosopher)
- Crispin Wright
- Timothy Williamson
Related ideas
- Belief
- Linda Zagzebski
- Virtue epistemology
- Formal language
- Faith
- Instrumental and intrinsic value
- Feminism
- Foundationalism
- Adam and Eve
- Artificial intelligence
- Outline of ancient India
- Innatism
- Pyrrhonism
- Hinduism
- Philosophy
- Hadith
- Halakha
- History of literature
- History of religion
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Yeshiva
- History of science
- Immanuel Kant
- Power (social and political)
Opposing perspectives
- Impermanence
- Enlightenment in Buddhism
- Duḥkha
- Theory of forms
- Agnosticism
- Perfectionism (philosophy)
- Outline of philosophy
- Tacit knowledge
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of philosophy.
Narrower topics:
- Al-Azhar University
- Aristotelian ethics
- Commensurability (philosophy of science)
- Craft
- History of literature
- History of religion
- Humility
- Ignorance
- Measurement
- Momentum
- Old English
- Procedural knowledge
- Psychiatry
- Qualitative research
- Quantitative research
- Self-knowledge (psychology)
- Sociology of scientific knowledge
- Yeshiva
- Biopower
- History of medicine
- Larissa
- Radical skepticism
- History of mathematics
- Kant's antinomies