Religious and secular convictions have powerful effects, but their fundaments are often surprisingly fragile. Because of the conspicuous role that nationalisms, populisms, and fundamentalisms have in our globalizing world it is essential not to take their strength for granted, but to acknowledge that conviction and doubt are part of the same dynamic. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that doubt and hesitation are daily concerns even among the Maoist movement in India, right-wing populists in Europe and newly pious (...) Somali Muslims in London. In fact, new converts are often such stringent believers precisely because they need to dispel their own lingering doubts, while revolutionary movements survive only through the denial of ambiguity. By studying everyday doubt this volume unravels the mechanisms by which convictions gain and lose their force, and analyzes the dynamics that propel loosely held ideas into committed action. Whereas a focus on overcoming doubt highlights the exclusionary effects of committed action, attention to the breakdown of belief serves to better understand the cycles of hope, conviction, and disillusion that bespeak the human condition. This is the central theme in several chapters looking at ideological break-down. The collapse of communism, for instance, produced an epistemological crisis in which all knowledge became unstable, prompting gold-miners in Mongolia to go as far as to doubt the cosmos. The post-ideological environment of Western democracies also produces anxieties, as the break-down of the bonds of trust between governments and citizens results in feelings of betrayal. Questions of truth and action are always related: if nothing is worth fighting for then apathy and hopelessness may become symptomatic. By paying attention to the mechanisms and dynamics by which specific ideas gain and lose their credibility this volume sheds important new light on the role of ideas in social and political action. (shrink)

During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India’s frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey office beyond breaking point. Far from producing supposedly unequivocal maps, many involved in frontier surveying (...) acknowledged that their work was problematic, partial, and prone to contrary readings. They increasingly came to construe frontiers as spaces that exceeded scientific understanding, and resorted to descriptions that emphasized fantastical and disorienting embodied experiences. Through examining the many crises and multiple agents of frontier mapping in British India, this article argues that colonial surveying and its outputs were less assured and more convoluted than previous histories have acknowledged. (shrink)

Through the lens of a neologism, sociocide, the killing of society, Keith Doubt provides persuasive evidence of the social, political, and human consequences of today’s wars, focusing on war crimes, scapegoating, torture, and capitalism.

This study examines the ritualized character of crimes against humanity in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Encompassing a victim, a victimizer, and a witness, degradation ceremonies structured the activity of what is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing. The observing world played the role of witness, which became a perpetuating component of the ritual.The discussion leads to the formulation of evil as the degradation of not only an individual human being but also humanity itself.

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and an intersubjective world, common to us all (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This role-taking success identifies the limits (...) of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of role-taking failure (Rosenberg, 1992).The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top .. (shrink)

In Squaring the Circle in Descartes’ Meditations, Stephen Wagner aims to show that Descartes’ project in the Meditations is best understood as a ‘strong validation of reason’ i.e., as proving in a non-circular way that human reason is a reliable, truth-conducive faculty. For such an enterprise to qualify as a ‘strong’ validation, Wagner contends, skeptical doubt must be given its strongest force. The most stringent doubt available in the Meditations is the deceiving God. To rule out the (...) possibility that an omnipotent God created humans so that their best functioning cognitive faculties provide misleading information about what the world is like, Descartes must prove that a non-deceiving God exists. Furthermore, only a non-circular proof will count as a ‘validation.’ Wagner spells out the requirements of non-circularity as involving a proof for God’s existence that is not deductive, does not simply achieve a clear and distinct perception of God’s existence, and proceeds on the basis of perceptions that remain true even when the reasons underlying them are not attended to any longer by the meditator. (shrink)

I doubt that even one of her readers will agree with all of Gutmann's conclusions--but they will all have to take account of the wealth of empirical evidence and stringent reasoning in this book.

Those who doubt the objectivity of historical interpretations of the meaning of texts either ignore the quite stringent conventional criteria by which such interpretations are justified, as Jacques Derrida did, or they overlook the cognitive significance of those criteria, as Hans-Georg Gadamer did. Historical interpretations of the meaning of old texts which satisfy five presented criteria are objective both in the sense of being rationally defensible and in the sense of being correct. The five criteria are that the (...) interpretation does not violate any of the semantic and syntactic rules of the language in which it is written; resolves any obscurities of reference and ambiguities of meaning arising from these rules; provides a coherent body of information; performs the first three functions to a much greater degree than any other interpretation which the text warrants; and perhaps convincingly explains away any failure to perform the first three functions. To arrive at an interpretation which satisfies these criteria, an interpreter first studies the literal meaning of the text, according to the rules of its language, and if need be, then examines the literary and the historical contexts in which the text was produced, and finally may even find it necessary to reconstruct the author's intention in writing it. Secondary interpretations of a text are preferred which colligate a large number of facts about the text, and give a fair representation of its meaning as a whole. Numerous examples both illustrate and confirm the theory presented. (shrink)

In the philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and psychology, the causal relationship between phenomenal consciousness, mentation, and brain states has always been a matter of debate. On the one hand, material monism posits consciousness and mind as pure brain epiphenomena. One of its most stringent lines of reasoning relies on a ‘loss-of-function lesion premise,’ according to which, since brain lesions and neurochemical modifications lead to cognitive impairment and/or altered states of consciousness, there is no reason to doubt the mind-brain (...) identity. On the other hand, dualism or idealism (in one form or another) regard consciousness and mind as something other than the sole product of cerebral activity pointing at the ineffable, undefinable, and seemingly unphysical nature of our subjective qualitative experiences and its related mental dimension. Here, several neuroscientific findings are reviewed that question the idea that posits phenomenal experience as an emergent property of brain activity, and argue that the premise of material monism is based on a logical correlation-causation fallacy. While these (mostly ignored) findings, if considered separately from each other, could, in principle, be recast into a physicalist paradigm, once viewed from an integral perspective, they substantiate equally well an ontology that posits mind and consciousness as a primal phenomenon. (shrink)

Philip Pettit's narrative of the eclipse of republican by liberal liberty in late eighteenth-century Britain adds colour and plausibility to his analytical contrast between republican and liberal liberty. The narrative supports his argument that republicanism and liberalism can be helpfully contrasted in terms of non-domination and non- interference conceptions of liberty. While the narrative has not been scrutinized in the literature, it is in fact flawed. The flaws raise new questions about how stringent a value liberty as non-domination is (...) and what motivated the value. The flaws also raise new questions about the significance of liberty as non-interference within the very strand of liberalism that Pettit focuses upon. Finally, the article casts doubt on some aspects of Quentin Skinner's interpretation of republican liberty. (shrink)

Pre-college philosophy has proliferated greatly over the last few decades, including in the form of ‘philosophy across the curriculum’. However, there has been very little sustained examination of the nature of philosophy as a subject relative to other standard pre-college subjects and the kinds of expertise an effective philosophy teacher at this level should possess. At face value, the minimal academic preparation expected for competence in secondary philosophy instruction, compared to the high standards for teaching other subjects, raises questions and (...) concerns. In this paper I make some provisional observations about the subject of philosophy and how it is taught from p4c through to the post-secondary level. I begin by examining the concept of ‘philosophy across the curriculum’ and offer a working analysis of the main features of philosophy's form and content that enable us to determine its relevance to, and difference from, other subjects. Next, I examine and critique what I term the ‘populist’ conception of philosophy, which correlates to lower expectations of teacher training, and use my own experience of teaching philosophy across the curriculum to shed doubt on the viability of this approach. In the third section I consider what I term the ‘autonomous’ conception of philosophy, which correlates to more stringent expectations of teacher capacity, and explain why it is preferable to the populist conception with some qualifications. I conclude by reflecting on how philosophy compares to other subjects that are advanced cross-curricularly and argue for more training of high school philosophy teachers. (shrink)

The criminal defendant is presumed innocent and his guilt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt for conviction. On some issues, however, the defendant must prove his innocence on the balance of probabilities to avoid conviction. Commentators have despaired of reconciling reverse burdens with the presumption in a principled way. Andrew Stumer has made a fresh attempt; however, his solution is overly rigid and rule bound. The presumption is engaged in a dynamic enterprise—minimizing the expected cost of error, mistaken acquittals (...) as well as wrongful convictions. Stumer’s fixed criminal standard and stringent restrictions on reverse burdens work against this goal. A more flexible approach is required, reflecting the calculus of error management. Where the cost or probability of wrongful conviction is relatively low, and the cost or probability of mistaken acquittal relatively high, it may be necessary to lower the standard of proof, or even to reverse the burden of proof. To inhibit these strategies is to increase the expected cost of error at trial. (shrink)

In the final chapter of Speech Matters, Seana Shiffrin argues that institutions have especially stringent duties to protect speech freedoms. In this article, I develop a few lines of criticism. First, I question whether Shiffrin’s framework of justified suspended contexts is appropriate for institutional settings. Second, I challenge the presumption that the knowledge-gathering function performed by police is necessarily compromised by insincere practices. Third, I criticize Shiffrin’s characterization of the university as involving a complete repudiation of enforced consensus, and (...) I express doubts about the close connection between education and democratic legitimation that Shiffrin endorses. Finally, I raise a problem with the book’s overall argument: even if one agrees that speech freedoms are necessary for moral development, they also may be threatening to moral development. The upshot is that the protection of speech should be modulated in order to account for the potential conflicts between sincerity and other valuable ends, rather than being oriented above all to sincerity. (shrink)

Robert Almeder has argued1 that three “fourth conditions” for nondefectiveness of knowledge justification claims, proposed in the recent literature,2 are essentially similar, require modification in order to eliminate the possibility of an unknowable defeater, and, so modified, render attainment of non-basic factual knowledge impossible. Although I believe there are objections to be raised against his exposition and reduction of the three proposed fourth conditions, I wish only to raise some doubts about the supposed necessity of the modifications and then to (...) argue against his claim that, so modified, the result is too stringent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hispanic Philosophy in the Age of Discovery ed. by Kevin WhiteIván JaksicKevin White, editor. Hispanic Philosophy in the Age of Discovery. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 326. Cloth, $59.95.The quincentennial of what has been termed the “encounter” between Europeans and Indians in the New World in the late fifteenth century furnished the occasion for much denunciation of the evils inflicted by greedy (...) intruders on the indigenous population and their environment. Many a conference was convened to reflect on such [End Page 463] events from the perspective of what appeared to be a consensus on the ultimately negative effects of European discovery, conquest, and colonization. In this context, it is quite remarkable that a conference on Hispanic philosophy in the age of discovery should have been convened to examine the philosophical figures and treatises of the era. As it turns out, this volume represents probably one of the most enduring outcomes of the myriad activities of 1992. This is a volume that ranges widely into the philosophical world of the period, brings to light the richness and significance of philosophers and their work, and provides a coherent and consistently well-researched set of essays.The volume consists of fifteen essays divided into five parts. Part I consists of one essay by Jorge J. E. Gracia which offers a wide panorama of Hispanic philosophy from 1500 to 1650, as well as a lucid interpretation of the historical reasons why Hispanic philosophy seems to have reached a dead end in the context of modern European philosophy, and suffered the neglect of intervening centuries. Part II consists of one essay by Mauricio Beuchot on discussions concerning the conquest of Mexico; two essays by John Doyle and Marcelo Sánchez-Sorondo on the work of Francisco de Vitoria; and two essays on the celebrated dispute between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas in 1550–51, the first by Eduardo Andújar and the second by Rafael Alvira and Alfredo Cruz. Part III includes essays by William Wallace on Domingo de Soto and Galileo’s science; Juan Antonio Widow on the economic thought of the Spanish Scholastics; Jean de Groot on the mysticism of Teresa de Avila; Yves Floucat on St. John of the Cross, and Mirko Skarica on the problem of future contingents. Part IV includes three essays by Norman Wells, Stephen Menn, and Carlos G. Noreña on the works of Francisco Suárez, probably the best-known Spanish thinker of the period. The volume closes with Part V, which has a long essay by John Deely on John Poinsot’s doctrine of signs.A volume of this scope and nature is bound to contain some overlap and repetition, as is the case with the pieces concerning the Las Casas-Sepúlveda debate. And yet these essays read well because the authors seriously undermine the conventional treatment of Sepúlveda as the hawkish defender of Indian slavery, and place him in the context of a larger Renaissance view of non-European peoples. Las Casas, in the view of the authors, had a great deal more in common with his opponent than the historiography has thus far suggested. In other sections of the volume, the variety of approaches and subjects on the part of the contributors challenges the reader to constantly shift grounds. Part III, for instance, takes us from the disquisitions on the velocity of falling bodies to the moral aspects of economic thought, and to the meaning of mystical theology. Fortunately, the competence of the researchers makes all individual pieces worthwhile even if this particular reviewer would have been somewhat more stringent with the space allotted to make a point.Contributors to this book leave no doubt as to the importance of their subjects, and yet they resist the temptation of exaggerating the extent of the influence of many of the Spanish authors on other European thinkers. Indeed, the essay by Norman Wells shows that while one must consider the linkages between Suárez and Descartes, there is [End Page 464] no reason to believe that the latter made Suárez’s position on the moderni... (shrink)

Attempts to describe the essential features of the Western philosophical tradition can often be characterized as ‘boundary work’, that is, the attempt to create, promote, attack, or reinforce specific notions of the ‘philosophical’ in order to demarcate it as a field of intellectual inquiry. During the last century, the dominant tendency has been to delineate the discipline in terms of formal methods, techniques, and concepts and a given set of standard problems and alternative available solutions. One vital feature of the (...) philosophical tradition that has played a certain rather subterranean but nonetheless indispensable role, which I will discuss in this article, is that of repeatedly and stringently calling into question the conditions of its own possibility. The Cartesian tradition shares with the anti-philosophers the insight that this questioning itself is and has always been a problem, perhaps the deepest problem, for philosophy. The idea that one has the right, even the responsibility, to pose questions that are non-standard, not comme il faut, perhaps even taboo, lay at the very heart of notions such as ‘the pursuit of truth’, ‘vita contemplativa’, and ‘philosophy as work on oneself’. On what grounds can one possibly assert such a right? In the Western tradition, it has most often been associated with a form of genuine doubt founded in deep engagement with some subject matter, i.e. the notion that one has a ‘problem’ demanding that one take responsibility for one’s beliefs and thoughts, both morally and logically. It seems to me that the meaning of this most basic attitude is something that each generation must rediscover for itself; indeed, recreate for itself in a new environment and under new conditions. Thus, the blindness of the past, in this self-understanding of philosophy, need not bind or blind us in the future. To the contrary, the European intellectual tradition can be seen as providing a series of perspicuous representations of intermittently faltering and flourishing attempts at asserting the viability of the idea of human freedom as essentially bound up with the pursuit of truth. As such, it is of necessity open to perpetual revision. (shrink)

There has lately been published a posthumous work on “pure realism” by an Italian philosopher who died a little while ago at an early age. He had been working on the book for some time with great concentration of energy, but did not live to finish it. In the form in which it has been edited for publication some parts of it have been developed almost to completion, while others are mere sketches and notes—though not wanting in interest, for they (...) reveal the author's method of working, and expose doubts and difficulties in the immediate form in which they presented themselves to his mind and found the way to a solution. The most complete section is one dealing with the critique of idealism, a critique which, while it is not devoid of ingenuity, is in the main stringent and vigorous, and deserves particularly the consideration of idealists. The principal thesis is that there are two possible solutions of the problem of consciousness. It admits the possibility either that consciousness itself creates its own world, endowing it, thanks to the action of the mind on its own images, with those physical attributes that make it appear external to the subject or independent of the activity by virtue of which it is formed ; or that consciousness is the immediate revelation of the world itself to itself, a revelation that can only consist in a unique act whereby the world establishes itself as identical with itself and as different from itself, as internal and external knowing and known, spirit and nature. At the basis of idealism, according to Ranzoli, is the implied presupposition that like is conscious only of like, and at the basis of realism is the Anaxagorean presupposition that opposite is conscious of opposite. (shrink)

This Article presents a theory whereby criminal punishments are routinely distributed in proportion to the weight of the evidence mounted against the defendant. According to this theory, the law relaxes the stringent decision threshold in criminal trials—beyond a reasonable doubt—by creating easy-to-prove evidentiary offenses. These offenses, in turn, are associated with less severe sanctions, thus creating a de-facto proportional liability regime. Against that backdrop, the Article examines the legal duty to report criminal activity to the authorities. As the (...) analysis shows, while legal scholars analyzing such duties have focused on the paradigmatic case in which an innocent bystander, friend or family member is unwittingly exposed to information about a crime, in practice these duties are rarely used in such cases. Rather, reporting duties are used to prosecute suspected accomplices whose involvement in the commission of the actual crime is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus, offenses imposing a reporting duty on criminal activity turn out to be part of the general framework of accomplice liability, and are used to apply less severe sanctions in cases of evidentiary uncertainty. (shrink)

In diesem Buch geht es um die Frage der Erkennbarkeit der Wahrheit und ihre theologische Relevanz. Welche Bedeutung hat der Skeptizismus in seiner antiken - und zugleich reifsten Form - fur Augustin, Descartes und Hegel? Welche Bedeutung hat die Auseinandersetzung Luthers mit Erasmus (1518-25) im Blick auf anthropologische Grundfragen wie z.B. die der Willensfreiheit? Welche Funktion kommt der Skepsis in den theologischen Entwurfen von v. Frank, Ihmels und Karl Heim (dieser ausgehend von Kant und Einstein) zu? Welche Rolle spielen Kierkegaard (...) und Nietzsche im Blick auf die cartesianisch-neuzeitliche These -De omnibus dubitandum est-? Inwiefern leistet die moderne Sprachphilosophie im 20. Jahrhundert einen Beitrag zum Thema der Gewissheit (Wittgenstein 1949/51, gegen G.E. Moore) und wie lasst sich der Beitrag der Transzendentalpragmatik (J. Habermas, K.-O. Apel, W. Kuhlmann) zur Uberwindung des Skeptizismus einstufen? Diese Fragen werden so behandelt, dass die verschiedenen Strange der Skeptizismus-Debatte fur sich dargestellt und in ihrer philosophischen sowie theologischen Bedeutung interpretiert werden. Das Buch versteht sich somit als Beitrag zu einer fundamentaltheologischen Grundsatzfrage, die losgelost von der philosophischen Debatte nicht stringent zu beantworten ist.". (shrink)

In criminal trials, judges or jurors have to decide whether the facts described in the indictment are proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, these decision-makers cannot always imagine every relevant sequence of events—there may be unconceived alternatives. The possibility of unconceived alternatives is an overlooked source of reasonable doubt. I argue that decision-makers should not consider the defendant’s guilt proven if they have good reasons to believe that plausible, unconceived scenarios exist. I explore this thesis through the lens (...) of the two most influential accounts of rational criminal proof—Bayesian and explanation-based approaches. I draw on related ideas from the philosophy of science to show why and when unconceived alternatives lead to reasonable doubt on either account. (shrink)

Stéphane Lemaire | : Subjectivists about well-being claim that an object is good for someone if and only if this individual holds a certain type of pro-attitude toward this object. In this paper, I focus on the dispute among subjectivists that opposes those who think that the relevant pro-attitudes are actual to those who think that they are counterfactual under some idealized conditions. My main claim is that subjectivism should be stringently actualist, though our actual pro-attitudes may be criticized from (...) an intrinsic perspective. To defend this claim, I first present three desiderata that a subjectivist theory of well-being should fulfil. Two of these desiderata result from the fact that a subjectivist theory of well-being should not be implicitly paternalist, while the other is that it should be able to play a normative role. I then show that several actualist theories that introduce light forms of idealization or other conditions that have a similar aim, fail to satisfy at least one of the antipaternalist desiderata. This gives some legitimacy to a very stringent version of actualism. I then describe three features of the kind of stringent actualism that I want to defend, which will explain the ability of what is good for someone to play its normative role. Finally, I show how these features allow us to deal with the classic objection that the objects of actual “defective attitudes” cannot be good for the holder of these pro-attitudes. | : Les subjectivistes à propos du bien-être soutiennent qu’un objet est bon pour un individu si et seulement si cet individu possède un certain type d’attitude positive à l’égard de cet objet. Dans cet article, je me concentre sur le débat à l’intérieur du camp subjectiviste qui oppose ceux qui pensent que les attitudes positives pertinentes sont actuelles à ceux qui pensent qu’elles sont contrefactuelles sous une condition d’idéalisation. Ma thèse principale est que le subjectivisme devrait être rigoureusement actualiste bien que nos attitudes positives actuelles puissent être critiquées d’un point de vue qui leur est interne. Afin de défendre cette position, je présente d’abord trois desiderata qu’une théorie subjectiviste du bien-être devrait satisfaire. Deux de ces desiderata résultent du fait qu’une théorie subjectiviste du bien-être ne devrait pas être implicitement paternaliste, alors que le troisième résulte de ce qu’elle devrait pouvoir jouer un rôle normatif. Je montre ensuite que plusieurs théories actualistes qui introduisent des formes modestes d’idéalisation ou d’autres conditions ayant la même visée échouent à satisfaire au moins un des desiderata anti-paternalistes. Une version très rigoureuse de l’actualisme subjectiviste s’en trouve ainsi légitimée. Je décris ensuite les trois aspects de l’actualisme rigoureux que je souhaite défendre et qui permettront d’expliquer dans quelle mesure ce qui est bon pour un individu peut jouer un rôle normatif. Enfin, je montre comment ces aspects nous permettent de répondre à l’objection classique selon laquelle les objets d’« attitudes défectives » actuelles ne peuvent être bons pour ceux qui ont ces attitudes. (shrink)

For Kant, knowledge involves certainty. If “certainty” requires that the grounds for a given propositional attitude guarantee its truth, then this is an infallibilist view of epistemic justification. Such a view says you can’t have epistemic justification for an attitude unless the attitude is also true. Here I want to defend an alternative fallibilist interpretation. Even if a subject has grounds that would be sufficient for knowledge if the proposition were true, the proposition might not be true. And so there (...) is sometimes still rational room for doubt. The goal of this paper is to present four different models of what “certainty” amounts to, for Kant, each of which is compatible with fallibilism. (shrink)

In Doubts on Avicenna, Ayman Shihadeh offers an extended study and critical edition of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī’s al-Mabāḥith wa-l-Shukūk, a key and hitherto unstudied source for twelfth-century Arabic philosophy. This text inaugurates the long commentarial tradition on Avicenna’s Ishārāt.

This volume delves into the question of how, in an Iberian world apparently far removed from the battlegrounds of modernity and secularisation, doubt and unbelief found fertile soil, stimulated by social and religious developments. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, the contributors show how the crisis of identity produced by forced mass conversion touched off inner crises about the nature of Truth. By tracing the path from medieval Spain to the Spanish Inquisition, and from the great literary and artistic works of (...) the Spanish Baroque to Sephardic Marranism, this volume fills a historiographical gap in European social and intellectual history, demonstrating the importance of the Iberian world in the evolution of European scepticism. Mercedes García-Arenal is Research Professor at CSIC, Madrid, and Stefania Pastore is Associate Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. They work on tolerance and dissent in Early Modern Iberia: on forced conversion, on the violent world of the Inquisition and the debates and protests that it sparked, and on the complex interplay of minorities. They have recently collaborated on After Conversion. Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity (Brill, 2016) and, as editors, Visiones imperiales y profecía. Roma, España, Nuevo Mundo (Abada, 2018). (shrink)

Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true. This is a view which runs against orthodoxy in logic and metaphysics since Aristotle, and has implications for many of the core notions of philosophy. Doubt Truth to Be a Liar explores these implications for truth, rationality, negation, and the nature of logic, and develops further the defense of dialetheism first mounted in Priest's In Contradiction, a second edition of which is also available.

The lack of public support for climate change policies and refusals to vaccinate children are just two alarming illustrations of the impacts of dissent about scientific claims. Dissent can lead to confusion, false beliefs, and widespread public doubt about highly justified scientific evidence. Even more dangerously, it has begun to corrode the very authority of scientific consensus and knowledge. Deployed aggressively and to political ends, some dissent can intimidate scientists, stymie research, and lead both the public and policymakers to (...) oppose important public policies firmly rooted in science. -/- To criticize dissent is, however, a fraught exercise. Skepticism and fearless debate are key to the scientific process, making it both vital and incredibly difficult to characterize and identify dissent that is problematic in its approach and consequences. Indeed, as de Melo-Martín and Intemann show, the criteria commonly proposed as means of identifying inappropriate dissent are flawed and the strategies generally recommended to tackle such dissent are not only ineffective but could even make the situation worse. -/- The Fight Against Doubt proposes that progress on this front can best be achieved by enhancing the trustworthiness of the scientific community and by being more realistic about the limits of science when it comes to policymaking. It shows that a richer understanding of the context in which science operates is needed to disarm problematic dissent and those who deploy it. This, the authors argue, is the best way forward, rather than diagnosing the many instances of wrong-headed dissent. (shrink)

The philosophical study of trauma involves considering this concept in a circle of apparently abstract examples, commenting on it from the perspectives of ontology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. The difficulty with trauma is not simply that it stands as a subject for disciplines of a different kind and intentionality, but that it is inherently bound to resist all theoretical reasoning at all. This notion is not so much contradictory as actively negative in relation to the usual application of theoretical apparatus (...) to it and its like. But the further one deals with trauma, even if one is not a metaphysician, even if one is at its mercy, the more clearly one realizes that thought cannot deny itself for the sake of earthly pain, no matter how much it may feel the urge to accomplish this self-overcoming, that it will remain itself even in the analysis of trauma, i. e., a movement from fact to essence. And accordingly, the trauma will be abstracted and revealed from paradoxical and formal sides, in its otherness and ambiguity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: How Does One Avoid Skepticism? The Experience Machine Contextualism My Take on Skepticism Notes.

We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is (...) afforded by the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others. (shrink)

In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived.

Learn to face and overcome the pitfalls of Zen practice--self-indulgence, suppression, speculation, asceticism--with this first complete translation of a Zen classic. "In Zen practice, the essential point is to arouse doubt. What is this doubt? When you are born, for example, where do you come from? You cannot help but remain in doubt about this. When you die, where do you go? Again, you cannot help but remain in doubt. Since you cannot pierce this barrier of (...) life and death, suddenly doubt will coalesce right before your eyes. Try to put it down, you cannot; try to push it away, you cannot. Eventually you will break through this doubt block and realize what a worthless notion life and death is -- ha! As the old worthies said: 'Great doubt, great awakening; small doubt, small awakening; no doubt, no awakening.'"--Boshan. There are many ways in which we may delude ourselves in practice. Doubt, Boshan argues, can be a powerful tool that rouses us from the complacency that comes with intellectual musing, ascetic striving, emotional suppression and quiet meditation. Great Doubt presents for the first time complete translations of Boshan's key works on working with doubt: "Exhortations for Those Who Don't Arouse Doubt" and "Exhortations for Those Who Do Arouse Doubt." This little book contains the most powerful medicine for the diseases that plague spiritual practice. (shrink)

This paper defends doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Standard examples of moral perception are better explained as transitions in thought whose degree of psychological immediacy varies with how readily non-moral perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject's background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral agents are normally disposed to have when they represent things as (...) being morally a certain way. (shrink)

Argues for a deflationary account of epistemic agency. We believe things for reasons and our beliefs change over time, but there is no further sense in which we are active in judgement, inference, or belief.

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne’s criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon’s Doctrine of the Idols, as (...) well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle’s moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume’s sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin’s and Schmitt’s works on modern scepticism. This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and José Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the forms and uses of doubt in works by Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Cicero, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Montaigne. Based on close analysis of literary and philosophical texts by these important authors, Michelle Zerba argues that doubt is a defining experience in antiquity and the Renaissance, one that constantly challenges the limits of thought and representation. The wide-ranging discussion considers issues that run the gamut from tragic loss to comic bombast, from psychological collapse (...) to skeptical dexterity and from solitary reflection to political improvisation in civic contexts and puts Greek and Roman treatments of doubt into dialogue not only with sixteenth-century texts but with contemporary works as well. Using the past to engage questions of vital concern to our time, Zerba demonstrates that although doubt sometimes has destructive consequences, it can also be conducive to tolerance, discovery and conversation across sociopolitical boundaries. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the tacit underlying sense of bodily certainty that characterizes normal everyday embodied experience. I then propose illness as one instance in which this certainty breaks down and is replaced by bodily doubt. I characterize bodily doubt as radically modifying our experience in three ways: loss of continuity, loss of transparency, and loss of faith in one's body. I then discuss the philosophical insights that arise from the experience of bodily doubt. The paper (...) uses a Humean framework with regards to bodily certainty, treating it as a taken for granted tacit aspect of normal experience. I argue that although bodily certainty is not rationally justifiable, we are nonetheless unable to reject it. Bodily certainty is thus revealed to be part of our brute animal nature. I conclude by suggesting that the study of pathology is a philosophical method useful for illuminating tacit aspects of experience. (shrink)

This chapter reviews several varieties of grounding skepticism as well as responses that have been proposed by grounding enthusiasts to considerations raised by grounding skeptics. Grounding skeptics, as I conceive of them here, are theorists who belong to one of the following two schools of thought. “Old-school” grounding skeptics doubt the theoretical utility of the grounding idiom by denying one of its presuppositions, viz., that this notion is at least intelligible or coherent. “Second-generation” grounding skeptics call into question the (...) theoretical utility of the grounding idiom for other reasons; their skeptical doubts tend to focus on one of the following three purported theoretical virtues grounding enthusiasts ascribe to their idiom: (i) its alleged power to unify an apparently heterogeneous collection of phenomena; (ii) its alleged power to capture and/or elucidate the distinction between the fundamental and the non-fundamental; or (iii) the alleged metaphysical (as opposed to mind-dependent, epistemic, or psychological) utility of grounding claims. Grounding enthusiasts have already formulated responses to many of the objections described in this chapter. At this point, however, it is fair to say that the state of the literature is still evolving, and no conclusive judgment can therefore be reached as of yet as to whether grounding enthusiasts or grounding skeptics have gained the upper hand in these debates. In the meantime, though, grounding skeptics continue to maintain that the classification of factual and/or nonfactual connections under the rubric of grounding does not really help us illuminate the nature of the connections at issue; instead, from the view of the grounding skeptic, we are better off studying these various connections separately and in their own right. (shrink)