We discuss epistemological and methodological aspects of the Bayesian approach in astrophysics and cosmology. The introduction to the Bayesian framework is given for a further discussion concerning the Bayesian inference in physics. The interplay between the modern cosmology, Bayesian statistics, and philosophy of science is presented. We consider paradoxes of confi rmation, like Goodman’s paradox, appearing in the Bayesian theory of confirmation. As in Goodman’s paradox the Bayesian inference is susceptible to some epistemic limitations in the logic of induction. However, Goodman’s paradox applied to cosmological hypotheses seems to be resolved due to the evolutionary character of cosmology and the accumulation of new empirical evidence. We argue that the Bayesian framework is useful in the context of falsifiability of quantum cosmological models, as well as contemporary dark energy and dark matter problem.

This article aims to reconstruct Max Scheler’s conception of three types of knowledge, outlined in his late work Philosophical Perspectives (1928). Scheler distinguished three kinds of knowledge: empirical, used to exercise control over nature, eidetic (essential) and metaphysical. I review the epistemological criteria that underlie this distinction, and its functionalistic assumptions. In the article’s polemic part I accuse Scheler of a) crypto-dualism in his theory of knowledge, which draws insufficient distinctions between metaphysical and eidetic knowledge; b) totally omitting the status of the humanities in his classification of knowledge types; c) consistently developing a philosophy of knowledge without resort to the research tools offered by the philosophy of science, which takes such analyses out of their social and historical context (i.e., how knowledge is created in today’s scientific communities).