This is a difficult paper to manage, because the syllabus is vast and sprawling - the whole of epistemology, the whole of metaphysics, and a few other bits thrown in just in case that wasn't enough. Accordingly, I have devised a mimi-syllabus: a fairly compact set of interlinked topics . Should anyone wish to study topics not on my list, I shall be happy to oblige. But the default option is what is laid out below.
The Faculty website offers a reading-list. You are welcome to use it as a resource, but I don't like it very much. For it, too, is bloated. Too many books and articles, and too many of them written post-1993. So you get a lot of the fads and fashions of the contemporary academic scene, and not enough of the wider picture.
You should aim to acquire a sense of the sweep and scope of a whole Theory of Knowledge. If you prefer textbooks on your first approach, try any of the ones mentioned on the faculty website. I suspect it is usually better to read proper books first, and in that spirit I offer first some modern discussions of the issues:
Robert Nozick
Philosophical Explanations, Clarendon & Harvard University Press, 1981. This is Nozick's Great American Novel, and it is crammed full of ideas. Parts 1, 2 and 3 will be most useful. We shall anyway be studying in great detail some of Nozick's ideas, and you would be well advised to have met them, at least, before term starts.
David Armstrong
Belief, Truth and Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, 1973. Nice and simple. A good book to begin with. And one which we will refer to again.
Gilbert Harman
Thought, Princeton University Press, 1973 and 1974.
John Hospers
An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, 4th edition, Prentice-Hall, 1996. A textbook, if you like, but a clear first look at many of the issues on the syllabus.
Thomas Nagel
The View From Nowhere, OUP 1989. This one takes you across much of the territory in K&R, chasing up a particular theme everywhere it appears: The Egocentric versus The Objective. You will like it.
And now some classic Theories of Knowledge.
DesCartes
Meditations on First Philosophy
Hume
An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
A.J. Ayer
Language, Truth and Logic