Knowledge-first epistemology gives up the traditional project of defining knowledge in terms of necessary, sufficient, and informative conditions. Rather, the approach gives knowledge itself explanatory primacy within epistemology. This chapter explores two ideas that have been prominent among knowledge-first authors and considers their implications for religious epistemology. The first is to equate one’s evidence with one’s knowledge, or with some relevant subset of one’s knowledge. The second is to reverse the traditional order of explanation between knowledge and justified belief; that is, to explain justification in terms of knowledge rather than the other way around. These ideas, we argue, have interesting implications for a variety of issues in religious epistemology, including the nature of evidence (and defeating evidence) for theism, and the prospects for Public Reason Liberalism.

While Quine is often taken to have broken the Viennese straitjacket of Logical Positivism, which rejected metaphysics, as an a priori but non-analytic, substantive discipline, allowing speculative metaphysics to be reborn, this paper argues against this. Instead, for all their much-discussed disagreements over analyticity and ontology, Quine shared Carnap’s more fundamental commitment to ‘scientific philosophy’: to the idea that legitimate philosophy is the work of handmaidens, site managers or accountants of science. Their primary role is to act to clarify, precisify and make explicit the methods and deliverances of science. The essay then brings Carnap and Quine to bear on more recent analytic trends towards metaphysics by specifically contrasting Carnap and Quine’s scientific philosophy with recent work by Timothy Williamson. This essay stresses Carnap and Quine’s considerable distance from Williamson; and that from Quine’s point of view as well as from Carnap’s, this recent ascendance of metaphysics will seem a departure from science without sufficient justification.

This chapter meets several of the objections that have been offered against truthmaker theory being a worthy metaphysical enterprise. It counters the charges that truthmaker theory is maximalist or nothing, and that it requires up-front contentious ontological posits. It also rebuts challenges from Timothy Williamson and Kit Fine that truthmaker theory is an inferior if not pointless endeavor. It identifies and argues against “truthmaker deflationists” who believe that the point of truthmaker theory can be accomplished without resort to any ontological investigation whatsoever. Finally, it considers challenges from those who might take the relation of grounding to be a competing and superior metaphysical notion.