Professor Emeritus - in memorium
Biography
Ph.D. from Harvard University, 1976
Curriculum Vitae
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Professor Talbott has taught and has published articles in epistemology, and moral and political philosophy, including the philosophy of human rights, rational choice theory, and the philosophy of law. Bill wrote his dissertation on reliabilist epistemology (The Reliability of the Cognitive Mechanism, Garland Publishing, 1990). He was the author of two books in the philosophy of human rights: Which Rights Should Be Universal? (Oxford, 2005), the Korean translation of which was named Korean Human Rights Book of the year in 2011, and Human Rights and Human Well-Being (Oxford 2010). His new book, Learning From Our Mistakes: Epistemology for the Real World, was published by Oxford in September 2021.
Research
Selected Research
- Talbott, William J. “Is Epistemic Circularity a Fallacy?” Philosophical Studies (June 2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01310-3.
- Talbott, William J. “A New Reliability Defeater for Evolutionary Naturalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2016): 538-564. doi: 10.1111/phpr.12338.
- William J. Talbott. “A Non-Probabilist Principle of Higher-Order Reasoning.” Synthèse 193 (2015): 3099-3145. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0922-y. This article can now be accessed online for no charge at: https://rdcu.be/6rSp
- Talbott, William J. “How Could A “Blind” Evolutionary Process Have Made Human Moral Beliefs Sensitive to Strongly Universal, Objective Moral Standards?” Biology & Philosophy 29 (July 2014): 1-18.
- Talbott, William J. “Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Hypothetical Consent.” In Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Cosmopolitan Ideals, edited by Matthias Lutz-Bachmann and Amos Nascimento, 25-44. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2014.
- Talbott, William, "Bayesian Epistemology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/epistemology-bayesian/
- Talbott, William J. Human Rights and Human Well-Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Talbott, William J. Which Rights Should Be Universal? New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
- Talbott, William J.The Reliability of the Cognitive Mechanism: A Mechanist Account of Empirical Justification. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990. Reprint 2015: London: Routledge.
- Learning from Our Mistakes: Epistemology for the Real World (forthcoming Sept. 2021, Oxford University Press).