William Talbott

Professor Talbott is Joff Hanauer Honors Professor in Western Civilization.  He teaches and has published articles in epistemology, and moral and political philosophy, including the philosophy of human rights, rational choice theory, and the philosophy of law. Bill wrote his dissertation on reliabilist epistemology (The Reliability of the Cognitive Mechanism, Garland Publishing, 1990). He is the author of two books in the philosophy of human rights: Which Rights Should Be Universal? (Oxford, 2005), the Korean translation of which was named Korean Human Rights Book of the year in 2011, and Human Rights and Human Well-Being (Oxford 2010). He is currently working on a book in epistemology to be titled, Learning From Our Mistakes, in which he proposes a new model of learning that applies universally, even to epistemology itself.