Much depends on what you mean by "the analysis of knowledge." I assume that you mean the attempt to explicate the respect in which knowledge is more than mere true belief, an enterprise that goes back to Plato's Meno . It seems to me that you think that discussion that attempts to fill whatever condition is necessary for knowledge besides mere true belief fails to make contact with what we care about when we care about knowledge. But even that discussion, I submit, seeks to capture the respect in which knowledge is valuable. Apparently the methodology by which this investigation has been conducted doesn't appeal to you--you seem to have doubts about the appeals to intuition in this context. While much ink has been spilled about the philosophical significance of intuitions, it does seem plausible that if one is to try to capture what is distinctive about knowledge, it is at least helpful to begin with clear-cut cases of the phenomenon as a starting point. And it seems to me that the ultimate aim...

I presume that in asking whether certainty suggests or indicates truth, you mean whether an agent's certainty about some proposition is a mark of its being true. If this is correct, then in order to answer the question, one needs to get clear about the kind of certainty at issue. It certainly does not seem to be the case that an agent's psychological certainty , or confidence, in some proposition, is a mark of its truth, since one can be confident about the truth of some proposition that isn't true. If the proposition, by contrast, is certain--if, for example, the proposition is a necessary truth, or a proposition that is the object of what Descartes in the Meditations calls the 'natural light', or reason, and hence can be said to be metaphysically certain, then the certainty of the proposition would indeed be a mark of its truth. It seems to me, however, that the propositions that we, as epistemic agents, are most interested in aren't metaphysically certain--_pace_ Descartes, I fear that we...

It should be noted that most philosophers who are interested in skepticism aren't themselves skeptics: they see skepticism as raising a challenge that must be met by an adequate account of human knowledge, and insofar as they try to defuse skepticism, they manifest considerable skepticism about its truth. However, attention to ancient skepticism reveals a divide in views about skepticism: Pyrrhonian skeptics were skeptical about skepticism, because one aim of Pyrrhonism was to avoid dogmatism about any and all beliefs; Academic skeptics, by contrast, seem to have maintained that skepticism was true, and consequently were sometimes called 'negative dogmatists'. (I say that Academic skeptics seem to have been negative dogmatists because it is a matter of scholarly debate whether the Academics were indeed negative dogmatists, and also whether there were other negative dogmatists.) One deep question is whether the Pyrrhonian or the Academic has the more coherent attitude to skepticism: after all, how...

In order to determine what role, if any, religion generally should play in knowledge about "how things are or came to be," it is essential first to know just what 'things' are at issue. For example, it seems to me that if the 'things' in question are truths about morality, then religion generally may well have a role to play; by contrast, it seems to me that if the 'things' in question are truths about the nature of the physical world, say, then it's not clear to me that religion has any role whatsoever to play in helping us to gain knowledge of such truths. (I write here not from any particular standpoint on the issue: indeed, even the great seventeenth-century French philosopher and theologian Nicolas Malebranche, who famously believed in the truth of occasionalism, the view that God is the only real cause in the universe, and, hence that all changes in the universe were effected by God's causal power, did not think that appeals to God were relevant in the context of giving scientific explanations. ...

The question seems to imply that 'true freedom' requires that agents must be the author of their own natures, and if one is the author of one's own nature, then no being--not even God--could predict how a truly free agent would act. The assumption that one needs to be the author of one's own nature in order to be free seems to be too strong, however, for it implies that only God can be free, because only God is traditionally conceived to be the author of His own nature. Suppose that one drops the requirement that a free agent must be the author of his/her own nature, and weakens it to the requirement that a free agent must be the author of his/her own choices. Then, the worry goes, if an agent is indeed the author of his/her own choices, then those choices cannot be foreseen. The assumption that God could not foreknow the actions of a truly free agent is extraordinarily problematic, for it would compromise God's omniscience, and hence would be rejected by most believers. ...