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Antonio Ramos Díaz has recently given an extensive critique of what I have called the "storage problem" for materialism about the human mind. I respond to Díaz, showing that his critique fails. First, I rehearse the storage problem, explaining what claims it does and does not involve. I then consider Díaz's "strong" and "weak" interpretations of my argument, explaining why I do not subscribe to the strong version, which misinterprets my position, especially concerning the meaning of the term "concrete." His weak version of my argument is closer to what I intend, but Díaz's own unpacking of this interpretation also commits me to claims I do not, for very good reasons, accept. Díaz does not, in the end, show the storage problem to be--as he thinks--an unsound way of arguing for dualism. Getting concepts into a purely material human intellect still looks like the metaphysical equivalent of fitting a square peg into a round hole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last several years a number of leading philosophers - including Catherine Elgin, Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Duncan Pritchard - have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the contemporary focus on knowledge in epistemology and have attempted to 'recover' the notion of understanding. According to some of these philosophers, in fact, understanding deserves not just to be recovered, but to supplant knowledge as the focus of epistemological inquiry. This entry considers some of the main reasons why philosophers have taken understanding to be more valuable than knowledge, focusing on claims that it is more transparent, that it better reflects or mirrors the world, and that it is a greater intellectual achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the roles of reason and sense-experience in epistemology and methodology in the "Phaedo," by the philosopher Plato. Argument for recollection in the "Phaedo"; Description of the philosopher's practice of death; Theory of the gradual development of the human mind.

Discusses philosophers' ways of loving wisdom. Distinction between theoretical knowledge as justified belief in propositions of a certain high order of abstraction and wisdom as a mature and intuitive nonpropositional grasp of practical truths; Understanding of wisdom as insight into the extra-empirical nature of reality and the human condition, the unwritten rules of effective interaction with other persons or reasonable expectations about the prospects of life and death; Limit of philosophy's romance.