Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Skepticism

  • A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and in Religion

    Top o' the Stack. This morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the…

  • The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith

    Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude…

  • The Skeptic

    The true skeptic does not deny truth. He is an inquirer who so loves truth that he will accept no substitutes, no easy answers, no comforting dogmatisms.  That some skeptics become Pyrrhonian slackers is no argument against skepticism properly understood. The true skeptic is an inquirer, not a denier.

  • An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism

    Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising: Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end). Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical…

  • God, the Cosmos, Other Minds: In the Same Epistemological Boat?

    Tony Flood has gone though many changes in his long search for truth. He seems to have finally settled down in Van Til's presuppositionalism.  Tony  writes, God, the cosmos, and a plurality of minds other than one’s own are in the same epistemological boat. [. . .] To be skeptical about one but not the…

  • Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

    Malcolm Pollack laments via e-mail: Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way? No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something…

  • Doubt, the Engine of Inquiry

    Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 13, part II, p. 10, #48: It is the first operation of  philosophical training to instill doubt, to free the mind of all those numerous suggestions and distortions imposed on it by others since childhood and maintained by its own slavish acceptance, total unawareness, or natural incapacity. Or as I have…

  • Some Aphorisms of E. M. Cioran with Commentary

    How to disentangle profundity from puffery in any obscure formulation? Clear thought stops short, a victim of its own probity; the other kind, vague and indecisive, extends into the distance and escapes by its suspect but unassailable mystery. (131)   Excellent except perhaps for ‘victim,’ which betrays Cioran’s mannered negativism. Substitute ‘beneficiary’ and the thought’s…

  • The Scatology of a Skeptic

    Philip P. Hallie, in his "Polemical Introduction" to Sextus Empiricus (Hackett, 1985, p. 7) writes: This special function of doubt [its "wiping off of the excrescences that befoul man's life and lead him into endless, bitter conflicts  with his fellow men"] is well though not pleasingly expressed by Sextus in the metaphor of the laxative.…

  • Inquiry, Doxastic Equipose, and Ataraxia

    Seldom Seen Slim writes, I'm very happy to see you writing (so well) about the summum bonum.   I don't have the text of Sextus at hand to cite you chapter & verse, but I think I recall this correctly.   It would be pretty ironic for a skeptic to denigrate inquiry since skeptikos means precisely…

  • Ataraxia and the Impossibility of Living Without Beliefs

    John Lennon bade us "imagine no religion."  But why single out religious beliefs as causes of conflict and bloodshed when nonreligious beliefs are equally to blame?  Maybe the problem is belief as such. Can we imagine no beliefs?   Perhaps we need to examine the possibility of living belieflessly.  In exploration and exfoliation of this possibility we…

  • The Characteristic Attitude of the Pyrrhonist

    Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied."  Aporia is not doubt.  Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding.  The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.…

  • Greco on Stroud on Moore on the External World with a Shot at Stove

    John Greco (How to Reid Moore) finds Barry Stroud's interpretation of G. E. Moore's proof of an external world implausible: According to him [Stroud], the question as to whether we know anything about the external world can be taken in an internal or an external sense. In the internal sense, the question can be answered…

  • Can One See that One is Not a Brain-in-a-Vat?

    John Greco, How to Reid Moore: So how does one know that one is not a brain in a vat, or that one is not deceived by an evil demon? Moore and Reid are for the most part silent on this issue. But a natural extension of their view is that one knows it by…

  • Are There Any Beliefs Over Which We Have Direct Voluntary Control? Doxastic Voluntarism and Epoché

    I suppose I am a limited doxastic voluntarist: though I haven't thought about this question in much depth my tendency is to say that there are some beliefs over the formation of which I have direct voluntary control. That is, there are some believable contents — call them propositions — that I can bring myself…