What is knowledge? What, if anything, can we know? Michael Ayers initiates a fresh approach to these questions, the most general in epistemology, by recovering the insight in the distinction between 'knowledge' and 'belief' that was common philosophical currency for two millennia after Plato. According to that tradition, 'knowledge' comes only with direct cognitive contact with ('seeing') reality or truth. A variety of philosophical methods are employed in
Knowing and Seeing: historiographical, phenomenological (with reference to current empirical psychology), and linguistic (exploring the footprints in language of our cognitive relation to the world). Ayers
fuels extended critiques of two lines of thought influential in contemporary epistemology: John McDowell's conceptualist and intellectualist account of perceptual knowledge and, most importantly, Fred Dretske's 'externalist' employment of sceptical argument. He unpicks the arguments for these other views and explores the failure of recent attempts at a comprehensive definition of knowledge.