Book Description
Shows how different forms of skepticism can lead to remarkably different moral and political implications.
Author : Petr Lom
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 10,46 MB
Release : 2001-07-19
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780791450307
Shows how different forms of skepticism can lead to remarkably different moral and political implications.
Author : Arnold Edwin Johanson
Publisher :
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 12,36 MB
Release : 1969
Category : Belief and doubt
ISBN :
Author : Michael Williams
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 420 pages
File Size : 42,7 MB
Release : 1996-01-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780691011158
In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived. Although philosophers have often found problems in efforts to study the nature and limits of human knowledge, Williams provides the first book that systematically argues against there being such a thing as knowledge of the external world. He maintains that knowledge of the world consitutes a theoretically coherent kind of knowledge, whose possibility needs to be defended, only given a deeply problematic doctrine he calls "epistemological realism." The only alternative to epistemological realism is a thoroughgoing contextualism.
Author : Donald C. Ainslie
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 36,35 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0199593868
Provides a sustained interpretation of Part 4 of Book 1 of Hume's Treatise, arguing that Hume uses our reactions to the sceptical arguments as evidence in favor of his model of the mind.
Author : Eli Hirsch
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 32,90 MB
Release : 2017-12-28
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1350033871
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 : James V. Schall
Publisher : CUA Press
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 13,73 MB
Release : 2010-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0813218241
James V. Schall presents, in a convincing and articulate manner, the revelational contribution to political philosophy, particularly that which comes out of the Roman Catholic tradition.
Author : John D. Barrow
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 38,10 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0195130820
Astronomer John Barrow takes an intriguing look at the limits of science, who argues that there are things that are ultimately unknowable, undoable, or unreachable.
Author : René Descartes
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 29,56 MB
Release : 2000
Category : First philosophy
ISBN : 9780941736121
Author : Bertrand Russell
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 41,90 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0192854232
This classic work, first published in 1912, has never been supplanted as an approachable introduction to the theory of philosophical enquiry. It gives Russell's views on such subjects as the distinction between appearance and reality, the existence and nature of matter, idealism, knowledge by acquaintance and by description, induction, truth and falsehood, the distinction between knowledge, error and probable opinion, and the limits and value of philosophical knowledge.
Author : Penelope Maddy
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 29,48 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0190618698
How do you know the world around you isn't just an elaborate dream, or the creation of an evil neuroscientist? If all you have to go on are various lights, sounds, smells, tastes and tickles, how can you know what the world is really like, or even whether there is a world beyond your own mind? Questions like these -- familiar from science fiction and dorm room debates -- lie at the core of venerable philosophical arguments for radical skepticism: the stark contention that we in fact know nothing at all about the world, that we have no more reason to believe any claim -- that there are trees, that we have hands -- than we have to disbelieve it. Like non-philosophers in their sober moments, philosophers, too, find this skeptical conclusion preposterous, but they're faced with those famous arguments: the Dream Argument, the Argument from Illusion, the Infinite Regress of Justification, the more recent Closure Argument. If these can't be met, they raise a serious challenge not just to philosophers, but to anyone responsible enough to expect her beliefs to square with her evidence. What Do Philosophers Do? takes up the skeptical arguments from this everyday point of view, and ultimately concludes that they don't undermine our ordinary beliefs or our ordinary ways of finding out about the world. In the process, Maddy examines and evaluates a range of philosophical methods -- common sense, scientific naturalism, ordinary language, conceptual analysis, therapeutic approaches -- as employed by such philosophers as Thomas Reid, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin. The result is a revealing portrait of what philosophers do, and perhaps a quiet suggestion for what they should do, for what they do best.