Explanations are important to us in many contexts: in science, mathematics, philosophy, and also in everyday and juridical contexts. But what is an explanation? In the philosophical study of explanation, there is long-standing, influential tradition that links explanation intimately to causation: we often explain by providing accurate information about the causes of the phenomenon to be explained. Such causal accounts have been the received view of the nature of explanation, particularly in philosophy of science, since the 1980s.

How does the idea that perception must provide reasons for our empirical judgements constrain our conception of our perceptual experiences? This volume presents eleven new essays on perception which in different ways address this fundamental question. Charles Travis and John McDowell debate whether we need to ascribe content to experience in order to understand how it can provide the subject with reasons. Other essays address issues such as the following: What exactly is the Myth of the Given and why should it be worthwhile to try to avoid it? What constitutes our experiential reasons?

Social epistemology has been flourishing in recent years, expanding and making connections with political philosophy, virtue epistemology, philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy. The philosophy of the social world too is flourishing, with burgeoning work in the metaphysics of the social world, collective responsibility, group action, and group belief. The new philosophical vista now more clearly presenting itself is collective epistemology--the epistemology of groups and institutions.

Political Ideologies provides a wide-ranging introduction to both classical and contemporary political ideologies. Ideologies are presented as frameworks of interpretation and political commitment, encouraging readers to evaluate how ideologies work in practice, the problematic links between ideas and political action, and the impact of ideologies in the world. The text's pedagogical features encourage students to think critically, viewing different ideologies as competing and contestable ways of interpreting the political world.