Showing papers on "Pyrrhonism published in 2003"

VIII—Hegel's Manifold Response to Scepticism in The Phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract: For many reasons mainstream Hegel scholarship has disregarded Hegel's interests in epistemology, hence also his response to scepticism. From the points of view of defenders and critics alike, it seems that ‘Hegel’ and ‘epistemology’ have nothing to do with one another. Despite this widespread conviction, Hegel was a very sophisticated epistemologist whose views merit contemporary interest. This article highlights several key features and innovations of Hegel's epistemology—including his anti-Cartesianism, fallibilism, realism (sic) and externalism both about mental content and about justification—by considering his systematic responses to Pyrrhonian, Humean, Cartesian and Kantian scepticism.

John Locke and the Sceptics

Abstract: Richard Popkin’s History ofi Scepticism, on which he is now engaged on a revised and expanded third edition, extending it both backward and forward in time as well as adding new material in the middle, is for me one of the most exciting books on the history of philosophy to have been published in the last one hundred years The latest edition, when it is finished, will take us from Savonarola to Bayle: from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment The first two editions of Popkin’s work do not consider any of the classic British Empiricists In the second edition he gestures towards them: “One could … follow the sceptical themes as they entered English philosophy in Hobbes, Boyle and Locke, the full-fledged scepticism of Glanvill, and then Berkeley’s heroic efforts to refute scepticism, and the collapse of his efforts into Hume’s Pyrrhonism”1 But, in that second edition, he did not stop to explore Instead, he passed on to consider Isaac La Peyrere and religious scepticism The omission might seem surprising, given the obvious place that the British thinkers have in the canon of western philosophy, and given the strong links between much of their thought and sceptical themes We are promised that this lacuna will in part be rectified in the third edition but in the meanwhile I offer some further thoughts on the matter as it relates to John Locke2

SCEPTICISM AND TRAGEDY : Crossing Shakespeare with Descartes

Abstract: Stanley Gavell has characterised the conception of tragedy as arising from the notion of presence generated by the 'crossing of Shakespeare with Descartes'. On the basis of the hypothesis or guided by the intuition, he has produced distinctive and compelling readings of Shakespearean tragedy. The power of the tragedy of King Lear is not enhanced but diminished if we have to resort to the hypothesis of Lear's puerility or senility to explain the mistake, made in the second scene of the play, from which such tragic consequences are to unfold. The claim, then, is that 'tragedy is the working out of a response to scepticism' and that the scepticism of which it is a working out is the scepticism which is given its definitive statement in Descartes' Meditations. That scepticism had been appropriated from the account given by Sextus Empiricus in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism.

Scepticism at Port-Royal: The Perversion of Pyrrhonian Doubt

Abstract: Some well-known studies have designated the main sources of philosophical scepticism, both Pyrrhonian and Academic, as it was known in the 16th and 17th century.1 A recent thesis by Emmanuel Naya underlines, with meticulous detail, the historical and textual complexity of the “Pyrrhonian phenomenon” and distinguishes appropriately between the Y p . this insistsdifferent types — or “strains” — of scepticism during this period. He insists on the difficulties which arise when one tries to reconcile Pyrrhonism with the conception of religious faith which was then dominant, and calls into question the theoretical coherence and historical pertinence of the notion of “Christian Pyrrhonism”.2 It is in the same spirit that I undertake here to revise and develop my own study of the exploitation — or perversion — of Pyrrhonism at Port-Royal.3

Scepticism and Analysis: Villemandy as a Critic of Descartes

Abstract: In reviewing Scepticismus debellatus in the February 1697 issue of Histoire des Ouvrages des savans Henri Basnage de Beauval praised the author’s design, “non seulement tres beau en lui meme, mais aussi d’une extreme necessite dans le siecle ou nous vivons”.1 The intent of Pierre de Villemandy, rector of the Walloon college in Leyden and former professor in philosophy at the Protestant academy of Saumur, in writing it had been to strike out against Pyrrhonism and, to quote the author of the review, “to overcome this dangerous and also injurious sect for the human race; this sect […] which strives to strip man of his most noble attributes: for, as far as it can, it deprives him of the certainty of knowledge and depicts him as a being unable of knowing anything whatsoever”.2 The topical nature of Villemandy’s enterprise, in the opinion of the reviewer, derived from the fact that the progress of scepticism always accompanies that of philosophy. The “tems d’ignorance” are the least conducive to scepticism, so much so that nothing is doubted among barbarian peoples and no sceptics are to be found in ages in which philosophy was unknown, whereas in the present age, in which philosophy has made more progress than it ever has before, the Pyrrhonian sect “leve la tete plus fierement que jamais”3 and seems to have attained a peak in a continuing ascent, which began with the restoration of letters.