Reddit reviews Epistemology: Contemporary Readings (Routledge Contemporary Readings in Philosophy)

Here is a contemporary epistemology anthology by Robert Audi and Michael Huemer that's focused on the justification of knowledge. Preview the table of contents for a list of all the readings!

And, here is a brilliant list written up by /u/voltimand:

What is the value of knowledge?

• Ward Jones, “Why do we value knowledge?”
  
  Methodological questions
  
  
• Jennifer Nagel, “Epistemic intuitions.”
  
• Jennifer Nagel, “Intuitions and experiments: a defense of the case method in epistemology.”
  
  Is knowledge the norm of assertion? That is, should we assert p only if we know p?
  
  
• Timothy Williamson, “Assertion” (from Knowledge and Its Limits).
  
• Jessica Brown, “Knowledge and assertion.”
  
• Matthew Weiner, “Must we know what we say?”
  
  Is knowledge the norm of practical reason? That is, ought we only to act on facts we know, rather than believe?
  
  
• John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley, “Knowledge and action.”
  
• Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, “Knowledge norms and acting well.”
  
  Is the principle of epistemic closure right?
  
  
• Fred Dretske and John Hawthorne, “Is knowledge closed under known entailment?”
  
  Can knowledge ever be gained by inference from a false belief?
  
  
• Ted Warfield, “Knowledge from falsehood.”
  
• Branden Fitelson, “Strengthening the case for knowledge from falsehood.”
  

You might look at one of the newer textbooks on epistemology, such as Robert Audi's Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction. If you'd rather work mostly from primary source readings, you could go with the readings volume that goes with that textbook. Those would get you up to speed with the contemporary parts of the field pretty quickly, I think.

You have good instincts to question your own knowledge. All too often, especially among newly converted atheist communities, you find an arrogance of self-understanding rivaled only by theist counterparts. In many cases, the only thing that changes in the conversion is the content of the beliefs, and not the arrogance and radicalism that goes with some strains of theism.

You might find this book on the history and philosophy of science interesting. It's an easy read. This book takes a more philosophical approach and some of the readings will be more difficult, but you still should be able to learn a great deal.

You could also follow along with a syllabus like this and you'll learn a lot.

>(black holes, statistical data of really any kind, macro scale evolution)

Forget the big stuff. Here's something to ponder: what direct evidence do you have that we live in a heliocentric, and not a geocentric universe? We take it for granted that this is the case today, but if you look at the actual things you experience (e.g. the sun's transversal of the sky), the more intuitive explanation is that we're at the center. We know now that this is the case, but it took a lot of work to figure that out (which you can read about in the first book I mentioned).

Here's a short list I made a while ago:

• SEP Articles
  
• Descartes – Meditations on First Philosophy
  
• Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
  
• Locke – An Essay on Human Understanding
  
• Ayer – Language, Truth, and Logic
  
• Russell – The Problems of Philosophy
  
• Quine – Two Dogmas of Empiricism
  
• Sellars – Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
  
• Williams – The Problems of Knowledge
  
• Rorty – Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
  
  /u/LeeHyori's recommendation of Audi and Huemer's anthology is fantastic as well.

A book that presents a cynical, nihilistic theory of knowledge or a critique of rationality won't be an introductory book for the study of knowledge. https://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Contemporary-Readings-Routledge-Philosophy/dp/0415259215 this book has some background info and essays from various authors that are relevant to most areas of the study of knowledge (origin of knowledge, structure of knowledge, skepticism). Bit dry but it's useful for getting a foundation on the subject.