Books by Jody (Professor of Philosophy Azzouni

In this book Jody Azzouni challenges existing epistemological conventions about knowledge: what it means to know something, who or what is seen as knowing, and how we talk about it. He argues that the classic restrictive conditions philosophers routinely place on knowers only hold in special cases, and suggests that knowledge can be equally attributed to children, sophisticated animals (great apes, orcas), unsophisticated animals (bees), and machinery or devices(driverless cars). Through this perspective and a close examination of its relation to linguistics and psychology, Azzouni freshly approaches longstanding epistemological puzzles including the dogmatism paradox, Gettier puzzles, Agrippa's trilemma, and the surprise-exam paradox.

Humans involuntarily experience physical items as having meaning-properties. Semantic Perception explores this experience-the phenomenology of the understanding of language-in depth. Jody Azzouni shows the many ways that we experience the meaning-properties of language artifacts as independent of the intentions of their makers.

If we take mathematical statements to be true, then must we also believe in the existence of invisible mathematical objects, accessible only by the power of thought? Jody Azzouni says we do not have to, and claims that the way to escape such a commitment is to accept - as an essential part of scientific doctrine - true statements which are 'about' objects which don't exist in any real sense.

If we must take mathematical statements to be true, must we also believe in the existence of abstract eternal invisible mathematical objects accessible only by the power of pure thought? Jody Azzouni says no, and he claims that the way to escape such commitments is to accept (as an essential part of scientific doctrine) true statements which are about objects that don't exist in any sense at all. Azzouni illustrates what the metaphysical landscape looks like once we avoid a militant Realism which forces our commitment to anything that our theories quantify. Escaping metaphysical straitjackets (such as the correspondence theory of truth), while retaining the insight that some truths are about objects that do exist, Azzouni says that we can sort scientifically-given objects into two categories: ones which exist, and to which we forge instrumental access in order to learn their properties, and ones which do not, that is, which are made up in exactly the same sense that fictional objects are. He offers as a case study a small portion of Newtonian physics, and one result of his classification of its ontological commitments, is that it does not commit us to absolute space and time.