Introduction

Abstract

Themes from Klein: Knowledge, Scepticism, and Justification is a collection of essays written to honor retiring philosopher Peter D. Klein, whose work has been and continues to be influential in the ongoing development of contemporary epistemology. Klein has done important work on skepticism, the Gettier problem, the structure of justification, defeasibility theory and defeaters, and his own hotly debated theories, including infinitism and his attempt to systematize what he calls “useful falsehoods.” Klein’s ideas have been influenced, he tells us, by twentieth-century predecessors such as Roderick Chisholm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and A. J. Ayer. But the reader of Klein’s work will be struck not by whatever similarity it bears to what has come before, nor by the extent to which it departs from the past, but rather by its intellectual integrity. Neither a conformist nor a reactionary, Peter Klein marches to the beat of one drummer: his reasoning. This introduction provides a broad overview of Klein’s ideas on each of the book’s themes (knowledge, skepticism, and justification).