Teaching Theory of Knowledge

FOREWORD

      The Summer Institute in the Theory of Knowledge was held for eight weeks in the Summer of 1986 under the auspices of the Council for Philosophical Studies supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Institute included a large number of lecturers who represented the major approaches to epistemology as well as the principal connections between epistemology and other fields of inquiry. One task of the Institute was to prepare an educational booklet of use to the profession. The participants in the Institute were a very diverse and very talented group of philosophers. They had a wide variety of interests and taught in a wide variety of private and public institutions. It was clear that they had a great deal to contribute to an educational booklet on the Theory of Knowledge, and we set out, during the last half of the Institute, to use their skills and information to produce a pedagogical tool for the profession.

      It became clear early in the process that our booklet would divide in a way that reflected the special skills of the participants and the perceived needs of the profession. There was need to present the contemporary materials that might be used in a course in epistemology in such a way that a teacher could assemble his or her course in an efficient way. Hence the Contemporary Sources section of the booklet. We thought other teachers would prefer more historical material and included a Historical Sources section. We know that not all teachers interested in epistemology would have the luxury of teaching upper division courses in epistemology, and, consequently, we sought to provide information as to how epistemology might be taught at the lower levels and how materials from epistemology might be used to construct a beginning course in philosophy. Finally, it was a major theme of the Institute that epistemology was connected with work in other fields, and we attempted to show how to construct courses that constitute bridges between the theory of knowledge and other fields. We have included modules, bibliography, sample courses, and even some sample assignments to assist and encourage those seeking to present literature from the theory of knowledge to a variety of students of varying levels of preparation and ability.

      One of the participants, the editor of the booklet, Dr. Clay, showed a special interest in coordinating the effort to get us working to produce the booklet. It soon became clear that she also had the very special ability to make the effort succeed. We, of course, gave her our complete support, but it was her extraordinary leadership and determination as well as her editorial and pedagogical skills that drove the project to completion. We wish to express our deep gratitude to all the participants for their work and cooperation in this undertaking, but especially to Dr. Clay for facilitating our working together on the booklet in the last weeks of the Institute. We sought to articulate the knowledge we had obtained during the Institute to present this booklet to our colleagues in the profession. It was Dr. Clay who welded it into a coherent whole.

      We should like to express our thanks to the participants and lecturers for their contributions to the success of the Institute, to Mylan Engel for his efficient service as our assistant at the Institute, and to Rosalee Burkart for her efficient secretarial service during the course of the Institute. We should like to express our special thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding the Institute, to the members of the Council for Philosophical Studies for sponsoring the Institute, and to Alan Mabe, former Secretary-Treasurer of the Council, for his effective administration of matters pertaining to the grant.

Alvin Goldman
Keith Lehrer