Why the A Priori Matters

By:  Richard Flockemann (Rhodes)

Recently, the notion of the a priori has been presented with a new type of challenge. Where the traditional, Quinean, strategy has been to argue that the a priori/a posteriori distinction cannot be clearly defined, John Hawthorne and Timothy Williamson have claimed that while it is possible to clearly distinguish the a priori from the a posteriori, the distinction is ad hoc: it does not draw a line between two interestingly different types of knowledge or justification. I argue that while Hawthorne and Williamson are premature to conclude that the distinction ought to be dismissed, this challenge needs to be taken seriously: any theory of the a priori does need to make the epistemic significance of the distinction clearer than is usually the case. I will offer a possible way of drawing the distinction that would make it clear why the a priori is an interestingly different type of knowledge.