Skepticism

Skepticism is a valid, and helpful thing. The Chastity of the IntellectThe Chastity of the Intellect
The Chastity of the Intellect - Vincent Hendricks

Humans are in pursuit of knowledge. It plays a significant role for deliberation, decision and actions in all walks of everyday and scientific life ranging from the humanities over the social to the natural sciences. The systematic and detailed study of knowledge, its criteria of acquisiton, its limits and modes of justification is known as epistemology.

Despite the admirable epistemic aim of qacquiring knowledge, humans are cognitive, accid...

Skeptical of what? - meta-narratives? - epistemology? - senses?

A skeptic is one who doubts the viability & veracity of claims

Greek Camps of Skepticism

• Academic Skepticism (can't express anything about what we know)
• Pyrrhonic Skepticism (can't know anything about what we know)
  • Pyrrho lived very consistently w/ his philosophy, until he got mad at his cook for making bad food

Skepticism started up again after the 30-yrs religious wars

• are we sure we're doing the right things? Religious knowledge just led to these horrors
• this is what DescartesDescartes
  Rene Descartes
  
  Background Info
  
  1596-1650
  educated at Univ of Paris
  Catholic Christian
  not an academic
  
  
  
  
  wrote Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy from a [[Rationalism
  rationalistic]] perspective
  
  
  
  
  claims he is making a whole new start in philosophy
  D. arrived at a certain and evident knowledge of the truth. He wants to see if he can persuade others by the same method that he himself used.
  ... was responding to

Skepticism is pretty fashionable today - how skeptical are today's skeptics?

Mitigated skepticism - having a different philosophy in the library vs in real life - we live life by habit & custom

HumeHume
David Hume

Wrote Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Wrote a History of England

Bkgrd Info

1711-1776
Scottish
studied law at 15, did not like it
self-taught in philosophy
published "Treatise of Human Understanding" at age 28

thought it would make him a rock star like Newton.
received little attention
ReidReid
Thomas Reid
Reid, Inquiry & Essays

Bkgrd info (copied fr. Kate)

important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment (18th century)
Presbyterian Minister
age 16, MA from University of Aberdeen
age 21, licensed preacher for Church of Scotland
age 27, entered Ministry
age 54, wrote Inquiry into the Human Mind
he was called to the University of Glasgow to replace Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy
Common sense = “The most important use of the term “common sense” in R... & KantKant
Kant
Wrote Kant, What is Enlightenment?
Man's primary problem isn't sin; it's that he doesn't have the freedom to reason & be enlightened (??)

Background

came from Prussia, wrote under Frederick the Great
Kant - a rationalist who wants to confine reason to the bounds of experience

reason is bound by the condition of possible experience; cannot reason about unexperienced things
so, we can't reason a/b God crating the world because we didn't experience it


... were the only philosophers who took him seriously




His Philosophy
What was in the air

the rationalism and dedu... uses skepticism to justify his disbelief in miracles