Trust is central to our social lives. We know by trusting what others tell us. We act on that basis, and on the basis of trust in their promises and implicit commitments. So trust underpins both epistemic and practical cooperation and is key to philosophical debates on the conditions of its possibility. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these issues. On the practical side, discussions of cooperation address what makes society possible-of how it is that life is not a Hobbesian war of all against all. On the epistemic side, discussions of cooperation address what makes the pooling of knowledge possible-and so the edifice that is science. But trust is not merely central to our lives instrumentally; trusting relations are themselves of great value, and in trusting others, we realise distinctive forms of value. What are these forms of value, and how is trust central to our lives? These questions are explored and developed in this volume, which collects fifteen new essays on the philosophy of trust. They develop and extend existing philosophical discussion of trust and will provide a reference point for future work on trust.

Trust is pervasive in our lives. Both our simplest actions – like buying a coffee, or crossing the street – as well as the functions of large collective institutions – like those of corporations and nation states – would not be possible without it. Yet only in the last several decades has trust started to receive focused attention from philosophers as a specific topic of investigation. The Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy brings together 31 never-before published chapters, accessible for both students and researchers, created to cover the most salient topics in the various theories of trust. The Handbook is broken up into three sections: I. What is Trust? II. Whom to Trust? III. Trust in Knowledge, Science, and Technology The Handbook is preceded by a foreword by Maria Baghramian, an introduction by volume editor Judith Simon, and each chapter includes a bibliography and cross-references to other entries in the volume.

Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers. In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel. A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it. According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

Trust is fundamental to epistemology. It features as theoretical bedrock in a broad cross-section of areas including social epistemology, the epistemology of self-trust, feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Yet epistemology has seen little systematic conversation with the rich literature on trust itself. This volume aims to promote and shape this conversation. It encourages epistemologists of all stripes to dig deeper into the fundamental epistemic roles played by trust, and it encourages philosophers of trust to explore the epistemological upshots and applications of their theories. The contributors explore such issues as the risks and necessity of trusting others for information, the value of doing so as opposed to relying on oneself, the mechanisms underlying trust’s strange ability to deliver knowledge, whether depending on others for information is compatible with epistemic responsibility, whether self-trust is an intellectual virtue, and the intimate relationship between epistemic trust and social power. This volume, in Routledge’s new series on trust research, will be a vital resource to academics and students not just of epistemology and trust, but also of moral psychology, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy – and to anyone else wanting to understand our vital yet vulnerable-making capacity to trust others and ourselves for information in a complex world.

The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of the contributors demonstrate how such a collaboration can result in new and challenging ways of thinking about trust and hope. Reading the dialogues may, therefore, also inspire others to work in the productive intersection between anthropology and philosophy.

We become untrustworthy when we break our promises, miss our deadlines, or offer up unreliable information. If we aim to be a trustworthy person, we need to act in line with our existing commitments and we must also take care not to bite off more than we can chew when new opportunities come along. But often it is not clear what we will be able to manage, what obstacles may prevent us from keeping our promises, or what changes may make our information unreliable. In the face of such uncertainties, trustworthiness typically directs us towards caution and hesitancy, and away from generosity, spontaneity, or shouldering burdens for others. In How To Be Trustworthy, Katherine Hawley explores what trustworthiness means in our lives and the dilemmas which arise if we value trustworthiness in an uncertain world. She argues there is no way of guaranteeing a clean conscience. We can become untrustworthy by taking on too many commitments, no matter how well-meaning we are, yet we can become bad friends, colleagues, parents, or citizens if we take on too few commitments. Hawley shows that we can all benefit by being more sensitive to obstacles to trustworthiness, and recognising that those who live in challenging personal circumstances face greater obstacles than other members of society—whether visibly or invisibly disadvantaged through material poverty, poor health, social exclusion, or power imbalances.

Do we need to reconsider scientific methodology in light of modern physics? Has the traditional scientific method become outdated, does it need to be defended against dangerous incursions, or has it always been different from what the canonical view suggests? To what extent should we accept non-empirical strategies for scientific theory assessment? Many core aspects of contemporary fundamental physics are far from empirically well-confirmed. There is controversy on the epistemic status of the corresponding theories, in particular cosmic inflation, the multiverse, and string theory. This collection of essays is based on the high profile workshop 'Why Trust a Theory?' and provides interdisciplinary perspectives on empirical testing in fundamental physics from leading physicists, philosophers and historians of science. Integrating different contemporary and historical positions, it will be of interest to philosophers of science and physicists, as well as anyone interested in the foundations of contemporary science.

Trust is central to our social lives and trusting relations are themselves of great value. In trusting others, we realise distinctive forms of value. What are these forms of value, and how is trust central to our lives? These questions are explored and developed in this volume, which collects fifteen new essays on the philosophy of trust.

Trust is central to our social lives. We know by trusting what others tell us. We act on that basis, and on the basis of trust in their promises and implicit commitments. So trust underpins both epistemic and practical cooperation and is key to philosophical debates on the conditions of its possibility. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these issues. On the practical side, discussions of cooperation address what makes society possible-of how it is that life is not a Hobbesian war of all against all. On the epistemic side, discussions of cooperation address what makes the pooling of knowledge possible-and so the edifice that is science. But trust is not merely central to our lives instrumentally; trusting relations are themselves of great value, and in trusting others, we realise distinctive forms of value. What are these forms of value, and how is trust central to our lives? These questions are explored and developed in this volume, which collects fifteen new essays on the philosophy of trust. They develop and extend existing philosophical discussion of trust and will provide a reference point for future work on trust.

This book presents cutting-edge concepts on the question of trust. Written by leading experts, it investigates a paradoxical feature of contemporary society: while information and communication technologies, on the one hand, and scientific discourses, on the other, can promote more informed participation in public and democratic life, they have also led to a dramatic decline in our communicative and cooperative skills. The book analyzes the notion of trust from an interdisciplinary perspective by combining the normative (continental) and empirical (Anglo-American) approaches and by considering the political, epistemological, and historical transformations in the interpersonal relationships sparked by new technologies. Using trust as a model, it then investigates and clarifies the new types of participation that are made possible by scientific and technological advances.