Monday, September 10, 2007

Epistemology 101

I may have posted this before, but I was re-reading John Frame's review of Esther Meeks's book, Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People, and thought it would be worth highlighting an excerpt:
This is a terrific book. I can’t begin in a short review to illustrate adequately the beauty of its writing and the cogency of its reasoning. But let me just say that I have never read a serious philosophical work (and this surely is one) that is as eloquently and delightfully expressed. Meek has a wonderful gift of illustration. Analogies and pictures fly from her mind like drops of water from a great fountain. Every page contains two or three of them, so there must be hundreds in this book. You’ll read about kitchen tables, golf games, copperhead snakes, children, weddings, on and on, as Meek seeks to show us how knowing happens in all the ordinary experiences of life. . . .

. . . . All in all, this is the best book on epistemology (let alone Christian epistemology) to come along in many, many years. It is a must for any serious student of the discipline and, indeed, for ordinary people who are trying to get clear on how to know God.