Laurence BonJour (born August 31, 1943) is an American philosopher and Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Washington.

Education and career

He received his bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Political Science from Macalester College and his doctorate in 1969 from Princeton University with a dissertation directed by Richard Rorty. Before moving to UW he taught at the University of Texas at Austin.

Philosophical work

BonJour specializes in epistemology, Kant, and British empiricism, but is best known for his contributions to epistemology. Initially defending coherentism in his anti-foundationalist critique The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (1985), BonJour subsequently moved to defend Cartesian foundationalism in later work such as 1998's In Defense of Pure Reason. The latter book is a sustained defense of a priori justification, strongly criticizing empiricists and pragmatists who dismiss it (such as W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty). In 1980, in his essay Externalist theories of empirical knowledge, Bonjour criticized the reliabilism of Armstrong and Goldman, proposing internalist approach to epistemic truth and knowledge justification. He formulated the examples of a clairvoyant and her reliable forecasts about the presence of the U.S. president in New York City. To set the problematic of this essay, Bonjour said that foundationalism, the most common form of internalism, requires the concept of a basic belief to solve the regress problem in epistemology: he wrote that this central concept is itself by no means unproblematic.

Publications

Books

Articles

Encyclopedia and dictionary articles

Reviews