Are there any philosophers who advance a non-foundationalist absolutism?

Question

I'm sure my terminology is poor here (background in math more than philosophy), but are there any philosophers who have advanced a distinctly non-relativist epistemology without ultimately coming out foundationalist? I'm not talking about coherentism or something like that; rather I'm wondering if any philosophers have argued that we may be able (incidentally, as it were) to know some things absolutely without claiming that any particular beliefs are axiomatically known to everyone?

For example, let's say that person A has a belief or set of beliefs which when understood in their entirety are self-evident (perhaps "I think therefore I am"). Rather than being merely coherent with person A's other beliefs, this conclusion is taken to be true in an absolute sense. However a person B (with respect to whose framework A's belief must also be considered true since it is an absolute) might be unable to rationally conclude that A's belief or set of beliefs is true, not only with respect to A ("A thinks, therefore A is") but even with respect to herself ("B thinks, therefore B is"). In fact, given the right circumstances it might even be inherently impossible for B to reach this conclusion. And similarly, B might be able to correctly reach absolute conclusions which A is unable to justify (even in regard to herself). Through the process of life the absolute claims which are and are not justifiable may even change for both A and B respectively. And no beliefs of any kind would be considered exempt from this possibility. Thus there exists Reality, an understanding of which is sometimes attainable, but there is no guarantee that any individual will be able to lay claim to a given part of it.

Is there any philosopher who would claim that this could be the case, and advances an argument in support of it? I hope I've explained well enough what I mean. Perhaps this could be called "incidental absolutism". Or is there a better phrase to describe a position like this?

Answer 1

I think the better phrase to describe a position like this would be "confused."

You say that person A's beliefs are "self-evident", and therefore can be "taken as true in an absolute sense."

Whatever epistemological warrant allows you to make the determination of what is or is not "self-evident" would then become foundational, so the resulting epistemology would in fact come out foundationalist.

Answer 2

I'm not exactly sure how to classify Paul Churchland's views, but they seem to be something like what you're looking for.

There's a strategy which one can take to end up as a non-foundational non-relativist of a sort, but you might quibble with one (or both!) of the non-'s: you adopt a basically coherentist point of view, except you note that, conveniently enough, people all seem to end up bound by physical laws (i.e. that is what is coherent), and so you're not really relative in any meaningful sense--even though you formally allowed the possibility, in practice people agree that, for example, snow is white, and anyone who says otherwise (when looking at white snow) is wrong, not operating with a different set of mostly-self-consistent propositions. In my opinion, this is the approach that the neurophilosopher crowd seems to take (Dennett, Churchland, etc.), although I don't recall having any of them spell it out in exactly these terms.

(One could argue that they are foundational because they take as axioms something like the scientific method to learn about the world and do not question those; one could argue that they are relativists because if it so happened that there were ten different societies with radically different but equally predictive interpretations of the physical world then their approach would force them to accept all of them as "true".)