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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
How Should We Rationally Deal with Ignorance?: A Philosophical Study

How Should We Rationally Deal with Ignorance?: A Philosophical Study

El Kassar, Nadja

Paperback

Series: Routledge Studies in Epistemology

Philosophy

ISBN10: 103245122X
ISBN13: 9781032451220
Publisher: Routledge
Published: May 21 2026
Pages: 262
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.57 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

This book addresses two questions that are highly relevant for epistemology and for society: What is ignorance and how should we rationally deal with it? It proposes a new way of thinking about ignorance based on contemporary and historical philosophical theories.

In the first part of the book, the author shows that epistemological definitions of ignorance are quite heterogeneous and often address different phenomena under the label ignorance. She then develops an integrated conception of ignorance that recognizes doxastic, attitudinal, and structural constituents of ignorance. Based on this new conception, she carves out suggestions for dealing with ignorance from the history of philosophy that have largely been overlooked: virtue-theoretic approaches based on Aristotle and Socrates, consequentialist approaches derived from James, and deontological approaches based on Locke, Clifford, and Kant. None of these approaches individually provide a satisfying approach to the task of rationally dealing with ignorance, and so the author develops an alternative maxim-based answer that extends Kant's maxims of the sensus communis to the issue of ignorance. The last part of the book applies this maxim-based answer to different contexts in medicine and democracies.

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