Fergus Prien

PhD

Philosophy

Image of Fergus Prien
Image of Fergus Prien

Fergus's philosophical research primarily lies in areas of naturalistic epistemology, reliabilist accounts of justification, the role that metaphysical factors play in human reasoning, the relationship between analyticity and a priori justification, and the defensibility of Realism in light of various 'underdetermination problems' levelled against methods of reasoning and the theories that they produce. Fergus also has an enduring interest in the Aristotelian philosophical tradition, especially in respect to contributions made by 13th Century scholastic and comparatively contemporary contributions made by analytic philosophers.

Fergus has been working at the University of Melbourne as a Graduate Teaching Fellow since 2022. He previously worked in the chemical industry at the Dow Chemical Company  for five and a half years.

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Thesis

Moderate Naturalism and the Reliability of Direct A Priori Insight

My research project is to answer the question: how should epistemological naturalists think about a priori justification? It is common for naturalists to reject that the a priori exists because they assume that the proper object of a priori reasoning is a belief about an analytic proposition, and since they take it that W.O.V. Quine's critique of analyticity succeeds, it follows that there is no longer a proper object for the a priori to justify. Other naturalists simply dismiss the claim that that the a priori exists on the basis of epistemological, metaphysical, and scientific objections.

I do not subscribe to either of these ways of thinking about the a priori. Instead, I take up a proposal from Alvin Goldman that (1) there is a plausible naturalistic case for thinking that the source of direct a priori insight is embedded within the cognitive system of each human epistemic agent, and (2) the reason that direct a priori insight is justification-transmitting is that the beliefs it produces are the result of a reliable cognitive process. In developing Goldman's 'moderate naturalism' view, I intend to show why, contra Quine's assumption to the contrary, beliefs about synthetic propositions are in fact the proper object of a priori justification. I also defend the moderate naturalist view of the a priori against the aforementioned epistemological, metaphysical, and scientific objections.

Research interests

  • Naturalist Epistemology
  • Reliabilism
  • A Priori Justification
  • Underdetermination Problems

Supervisors