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Author: Eli Hirsch Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350033871 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt brings something new to epistemology both in content and style. At the outset we are asked to imagine a person named Vatol who grows up in a world containing numerous people who are brains-in-vats and who hallucinate their entire lives. Would Vatol have reason to doubt whether he himself is in contact with reality? If he does have reason to doubt, would he doubt, or is it impossible for a person to have such doubts? And how do we ourselves compare to Vatol? After reflection, can we plausibly claim that Vatol has reason to doubt, but we don't? These are the questions that provide the novel framework for the debates in this book. Topics that are treated here in significantly new ways include: the view that we ought to doubt only when we philosophize; epistemological “dogmatism”; and connections between radical doubt and “having a self.” The book adopts the innovative form of a “dialogue/play.” The three characters, who are Talmud students as well as philosophers, hardly limit themselves to pure philosophy, but regale each other with Talmudic allusions, reminiscences, jokes, and insults. For them the possibility of doubt emerges as an existential problem with potentially deep emotional significance. Setting complex arguments about radical skepticism within entertaining dialogue, this book can be recommended for both beginners and specialists.
Author: Eli Hirsch Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350033871 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt brings something new to epistemology both in content and style. At the outset we are asked to imagine a person named Vatol who grows up in a world containing numerous people who are brains-in-vats and who hallucinate their entire lives. Would Vatol have reason to doubt whether he himself is in contact with reality? If he does have reason to doubt, would he doubt, or is it impossible for a person to have such doubts? And how do we ourselves compare to Vatol? After reflection, can we plausibly claim that Vatol has reason to doubt, but we don't? These are the questions that provide the novel framework for the debates in this book. Topics that are treated here in significantly new ways include: the view that we ought to doubt only when we philosophize; epistemological “dogmatism”; and connections between radical doubt and “having a self.” The book adopts the innovative form of a “dialogue/play.” The three characters, who are Talmud students as well as philosophers, hardly limit themselves to pure philosophy, but regale each other with Talmudic allusions, reminiscences, jokes, and insults. For them the possibility of doubt emerges as an existential problem with potentially deep emotional significance. Setting complex arguments about radical skepticism within entertaining dialogue, this book can be recommended for both beginners and specialists.
Author: Michael Bergmann Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192898485 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
Radical skepticism endorses the extreme claim that large swaths of our ordinary beliefs, such as those produced by perception or memory, are irrational. The best arguments for such skepticism are, in their essentials, as familiar as a popular science fiction movie and yet even seasoned epistemologists continue to find them strangely seductive. Moreover, although most contemporary philosophers dismiss radical skepticism, they cannot agree on how best to respond to the challenge it presents. In the tradition of the 18th century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition joins this discussion by taking up four main tasks. First, it identifies the strongest arguments for radical skepticism, namely, underdetermination arguments, which emphasize the gap between our evidence and our ordinary beliefs based on that evidence. Second, it rejects all inferential or argument-based responses to radical skepticism, which aim to lay out good noncircular reasoning from the evidence on which we base our ordinary beliefs to the conclusion that those beliefs are probably true. Third, it develops a commonsense noninferential response to radical skepticism with two distinctive features: (a) it consciously and extensively relies on epistemic intuitions, which are seemings about epistemic goods, such as knowledge and rationality, and (b) it can be endorsed without difficulty by both internalists and externalists in epistemology. Fourth, and finally, it defends this commonsense epistemic-intuition-based response to radical skepticism against a variety of objections, including those connected with underdetermination worries, epistemic circularity, disagreement problems, experimental philosophy, and concerns about whether it engages skepticism in a sufficiently serious way.
Author: Genia Schönbaumsfeld Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019108655X Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
The Illusion of Doubt shows that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of our evidential situation - the view that my epistemic grounds in both the 'good' and the 'bad' cases must be the same, and consists in information about an inner mental realm of experience from which I must try to work my way out to what goes on 'out there' in the external world. It is this picture which issues both a standing invitation to radical scepticism and ensures that there is no way of getting out of it while agreeing to the sceptic's terms. What we therefore need to do is not try to answer the sceptical problem 'directly', but rather to undermine the assumptions that it depends on. These are among the most ingrained in contemporary epistemology. They include the notion that radical scepticism can be motivated by the 'closure' principle for knowledge, that the 'Indistinguishability Argument' renders the Cartesian conception compulsory, that the 'new evil genius thesis' is coherent, and the demand for a 'global validation' of our epistemic practices makes sense. Once these dogmas are undermined, the path is clear for a 'realism without empiricism' that allows us to re-establish unmediated contact with the objects and persons in our environment which an illusion of doubt had threatened to put forever beyond our cognitive grasp.
Author: Adam Leite Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019769117X Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
How to Take Skepticism Seriously argues that philosophical skepticism--the idea that we cannot know anything definitive about the world around us--is false for straightforward reasons that we can all appreciate when we reflectively work from within our everyday practices, procedures, and commitments. No epistemological theory-building is needed. Adam Leite thus offers a resolution to a problem that has haunted philosophy since Descartes, implements and defends a neglected methodological approach, and elucidates the tradition of G. E. Moore and J. L. Austin. While engaging with prominent work in contemporary epistemology, the book offers a fundamentally different understanding of the relation between core philosophical issues and everyday life.
Author: Duncan Pritchard Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691183430 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Epistemic Angst offers a completely new solution to the ancient philosophical problem of radical skepticism—the challenge of explaining how it is possible to have knowledge of a world external to us. Duncan Pritchard argues that the key to resolving this puzzle is to realize that it is composed of two logically distinct problems, each requiring its own solution. He then puts forward solutions to both problems. To that end, he offers a new reading of Wittgenstein's account of the structure of rational evaluation and demonstrates how this provides an elegant solution to one aspect of the skeptical problem. Pritchard also revisits the epistemological disjunctivist proposal that he developed in previous work and shows how it can effectively handle the other aspect of the problem. Finally, he argues that these two antiskeptical positions, while superficially in tension with each other, are not only compatible but also mutually supporting. The result is a comprehensive and distinctive resolution to the problem of radical skepticism, one that challenges many assumptions in contemporary epistemology.
Author: Berislav Marusić Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198851162 Category : Emotions (Philosophy) Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Many emotions attenuate more rapidly than the significance of the considerations that gives rise to them as we accommodate ourselves to what happens. Grief often diminishes quickly, even though the dead continue to matter to us; anger often evaporates, even though the injustice to which it responds remains undiminished. Nonetheless, such accommodation seems acceptable: it would be a mistake to be persistently grieving or to be relentlessly angry. But how could it be acceptable, if the reasons for grief and anger remain significant? Unlike grief and anger, whose diminution is puzzling, what seems puzzling in the case of love is its continuation. In its self-consciousness, love is endless; in loving someone, we foresee no end to our love. Yet we know that love can end: hearts are broken, lovers betrayed, and people grow apart. Does the self-consciousness of love involve a mistake? Or can we reasonably think of our love as lasting? On the Temporality of Emotions argues that whereas grief and anger reasonably diminish, love can rationally be conceived as endless. Berislav Marusic draws on contemporary theories of the emotions, especially grief and love, as well as recent accounts of reasons. It puts forward an account of emotional self-consciousness as, at once, embodied and rational, and maintains that accommodation reveals an irreconcilable moment in our emotional life, a moment that philosophical reflection ought not seek to resolve, lest our emotions are conceived as too neat, and philosophy as too comforting.
Author: Steven D. Hales Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350149314 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck-novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics-and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune. The Myth of Luck tells us why we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. Taking us on a guided tour of one of our oldest concepts, we begin in ancient Greece and Rome, considering how Plato, Plutarch, and the Stoics understood luck, before entering the theoretical world of probability and exploring how luck relates to theology, sports, ethics, gambling, knowledge, and present-day psychology. As we travel across traditions, times and cultures, we come to realize that it's not that as soon as we solve one philosophical problem with luck that two more appear, like heads on a hydra, but rather that the monster is altogether mythological. We cannot master luck because there is nothing to defeat: luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion. By introducing us to compelling arguments and convincing reasons that explain why there is no such thing as luck, we finally see why in a very real sense we make our own luck, that luck is our own doing. The Myth of Luck helps us to regain our own agency in the world - telling the entertaining story of the philosophy and history of luck along the way.
Author: Eli Hirsch Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic ISBN: 9781350033849 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt brings something new to epistemology both in content and style. At the outset we are asked to imagine a person named Vatol who grows up in a world containing numerous people who are brains-in-vats and who hallucinate their entire lives. Would Vatol have reason to doubt whether he himself is in contact with reality? If he does have reason to doubt, would he doubt, or is it impossible for a person to have such doubts? And how do we ourselves compare to Vatol? After reflection, can we plausibly claim that Vatol has reason to doubt, but we don't? These are the questions that provide the novel framework for the debates in this book. Topics that are treated here in significantly new ways include: the view that we ought to doubt only when we philosophize; epistemological “dogmatism”; and connections between radical doubt and “having a self.” The book adopts the innovative form of a “dialogue/play.” The three characters, who are Talmud students as well as philosophers, hardly limit themselves to pure philosophy, but regale each other with Talmudic allusions, reminiscences, jokes, and insults. For them the possibility of doubt emerges as an existential problem with potentially deep emotional significance. Setting complex arguments about radical skepticism within entertaining dialogue, this book can be recommended for both beginners and specialists.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9047431901 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
This book reassesses the role and impact of skepticism in early modern philosophy, revisiting and reinterpreting the positions of some of the main early modern philosophers in relation to this tradition and showing its relevance to others who have not previously been connected to skepticism.
Author: Eli Hirsch
Author: Eli Hirsch
Author: Michael Bergmann
Author: Genia Schönbaumsfeld
Author: Adam Leite
Author: Duncan Pritchard
Author: Berislav Marusić
Author: Steven D. Hales
Author: Eli Hirsch
Author: 
Author: Joseph Barker