Winter Quarter

The focus of this seminar will be inquiry, the activity of engaging some thing(s) or other in the world for some revelatory purpose, such as knowing about that thing or understanding it. We frequently engage in inquiry, regarding matters significant and insignificant, for personal and professional reasons. We will try to come to a better understanding of this activity, raising questions of how it can (or should) be conducted, what its limits are and, relatedly, whether and how inquiry can come to an end. In these connections, we will consider the so-called zetetic turn in recent discussions of epistemology. We will also examine the relation between inquiry and explanation. More particularly, we will consider the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the thesis that everything has an explanation, in order to assess the truth of this thesis and what it or other similar explanatory principles reveal about the scope of inquiry. The basis of our discussion will be a number of recent papers on the topic of inquiry and the Principle of Sufficient Reason from the philosophical literature.