Download or read book Belief and Truth written by Katja Maria Vogt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato explores a Socratic intuition about belief, doxa — belief is "shameful." In aiming for knowledge, one must aim to get rid of beliefs. Vogt shows how deeply this proposal differs from contemporary views, but that it nevertheless speaks to intuitions we are likely to share with Plato, ancient skeptics, and Stoic epistemologists.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne written by Philippe Desan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 841 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Montaigne's Essays resemble a patchwork of personal reflections, but they engage with questions that animate the human mind, and tend to a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death. For this reason, Montaigne's thought and writings have been a subject of enduring interest across disciplines. This Handbook brings together essays by prominent scholars that examine Montaigne's literary, philosophical, and political contributions, and assess his legacy and relevance today in a global perspective. It presents Montaigne's Essays not only in their historical context but also as a starting point for discussing issues that concern us today.

Download or read book Post Truth Scepticism Power written by Stuart Sim and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the concept of post-truth and the impact it is having on contemporary life, bringing out both its philosophical and political dimensions. Post-truth is contextualised within the philosophical discourse of truth, with particular reference to theories of scepticism and relativism, to explore whether it can take advantage of these to claim any intellectual credibility. Sim argues that post-truth cannot be defended on either sceptical or relativistic grounds – even those provided by recent iconoclastic philosophical movements such as poststructuralism and postmodernism. The affinity between post-truth and conspiracy theory is emphasised, and the extent to which post-truth plays a role in religious doctrine is also considered. Post-truth is seen to constitute a threat to liberal democratic ideals and our Enlightenment heritage, raising the question of whether we are moving into a post-liberal age where the far right would hold power. To prevent this, post-truth urgently needs to be countered.

Download or read book Formal Epistemology and Cartesian Skepticism written by Tomoji Shogenji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops new techniques in formal epistemology and applies them to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. It introduces two formats of epistemic evaluation that should be of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science: the dual-component format, which evaluates a statement on the basis of its safety and informativeness, and the relative-divergence format, which evaluates a probabilistic model on the basis of its complexity and goodness of fit with data. Tomoji Shogenji shows that the former lends support to Cartesian skepticism, but the latter allows us to defeat Cartesian skepticism. Along the way, Shogenji addresses a number of related issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, including epistemic circularity, epistemic closure, and inductive skepticism.

Download or read book Making Sense of God written by Timothy Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Download or read book The Plain Truth written by Thomas M. Lennon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historical study of Pierre-Daniel Hueta (TM)s "Censura philosophiae cartesiana" (1689) and the controversy surrounding it, shows that there are good answers to the perennial standard criticisms of Descartesa (TM)s philosophy: the method of doubt, the cogito, proofs of Goda (TM)s existence, etc.

Download or read book Escape from Scepticism written by Christopher Derrick and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant English writer Christopher Derrick presents a disturbing indictment of today's colleges and universities and the troubled condition of liberal education. The occasion for his writing this book was a visit to Thomas Aquinas College in California which deeply impressed Derrick with its true liberal and Catholic education. This small independent college convinced him of the need for reform in Catholic higher education today, and he uses the example of this college as the way this reform should be carried out. "This book is comparable to Newman's Idea of a University. Derrick has wit and a brilliant aphoristic style. This book could well serve as a manual for the reform of Catholic higher education today." -Paul Hallet, The National Catholic Register

Download or read book The Bitter Truth of Reality written by Mahmoud Elsayed and published by Mahmoud Elsayed . This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reality is the one word that describes everything we live in, everything we know, knew, and will. It represents time, space, and all the other possible dimensions. But what exactly is reality? In his book, The Bitter Truth of Reality, author Mahmoud Elsayed attempts to answer this complex query by taking a journey through physics, biology, human anatomy, history, philosophy, and even religions. Hopefully, by the end of this book, the reader will find an answer to this question that sits at the top of the existential questions list. It also offers an opportunity for its readers to come to terms with being an ordinary human within the shadow of the grand scheme of all existence. Humanity currently lives in a time when rationality is prioritized above everything else. We define reality by what our minds process to be true from data our senses can provide us. As a result, each of us treats any idea, belief, or experience that fails logic as impossible or flawed. But should humanity put faith in how our limited biology interprets reality around us, and can we rely on our minds to tell us everything there is to know about us, our universe - or even what's outside of it? This book describes how mankind, in search of objective insight, has entrusted science with the duty of filtering reality from the surreal. However, in place of answers, scientific inquiry might be doomed to discover only more questions. In the end, how can we tell apart what is real, and how does this change what we know about ourselves? The more we develop as a species, the more questions we will ask about the truth of our existence. Are we here on purpose? Or are we the result of some cosmic accident? More inquires and discussions in The Bitter Truth of reality.

Download or read book God and Skepticism written by T. Penelhum and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exercise in philosophical criticism. What I criticize are some variations on a recurrent theme in religious thought: the theme that faith and reason are so disparate that faith is not undermined, but strengthened, if we judge that reason can give it no support. The common name for this view is Fideism. Those representatives of it that I have chosen to discuss do more, however, than insist on keeping faith free of the alleged contaminations of philosophical argument. They consider the case for Fideism to be made even stronger if one judges that reason cannot give us truth or assurance outside the sphere of faith any more than within it. In other words, they sustain their Fideism by an appeal to Skepticism. I call them, therefore, Skeptical Fideists. Skeptical Fideism is not a mere historical curiosity. Richard Popkin has shown us how wide its impact in the formative period of modern philosophy has been; and its impact on modern theological and apologetic reasoning has been immense. In my view, anyone who wishes to assess many of the assump tions current in the theologies of our time has to take account of it; I think, therefore, that there is a topical value in examining the figures whose views I discuss here - Erasmus, Montaigne, Bayle, and more importantly, Pascal and Kierkegaard.

Download or read book Knowledge and Skepticism written by Joseph Keim Campbell and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-05-21 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays by leading philosophers explore topics in epistemology, offering both contemporary philosophical analysis and historical perspectives. There are two main questions in epistemology: What is knowledge? And: Do we have any of it? The first question asks after the nature of a concept; the second involves grappling with the skeptic, who believes that no one knows anything. This collection of original essays addresses the themes of knowledge and skepticism, offering both contemporary epistemological analysis and historical perspectives from leading philosophers and rising scholars. Contributors first consider knowledge: the intrinsic nature of knowledge—in particular, aspects of what distinguishes knowledge from true belief; the extrinsic examination of knowledge, focusing on contextualist accounts; and types of knowledge, specifically perceptual, introspective, and rational knowledge. The final chapters offer various perspectives on skepticism. Knowledge and Skepticism provides an eclectic yet coherent set of essays by distinguished scholars and important new voices. The cutting-edge nature of its contributions and its interdisciplinary character make it a valuable resource for a wide audience—for philosophers of language as well as for epistemologists, and for psychologists, decision theorists, historians, and students at both the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels. Contributors Kent Bach, Joseph Keim Campbell, Joseph Cruz, Fred Dretske, Catherine Z. Elgin, Peter S. Fosl, Peter J. Graham, David Hemp, Michael O'Rourke, George Pappas, John L. Pollock, Duncan Pritchard, Joseph Salerno, Robert J. Stainton, Harry S. Silverstein, Joseph Thomas Tolliver, Leora Weitzman

Download or read book How to Be a Pyrrhonist written by Richard Bett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores what it was like to argue and to live as a practitioner of Pyrrhonist skepticism.

Download or read book What Do Philosophers Do written by Penelope Maddy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition written by Jessica Berry and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents a portrait of Nietzsche as the skeptic par excellence in the modern period, by demonstrating how a careful and informed understanding of ancient Pyrrhonism illuminates his reflections on truth, knowledge and morality, as well as the very nature and value of philosophic inquiry.

Download or read book Literature and Skepticism written by Pablo Oyarzun and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and Skepticism links the skeptic attitude to the conditions of possibility in (modern) literature—in particular, the narrative form and the essay. Pablo Oyarzun proposes that narrative and the essay document the relationship between literature and skepticism in different but complementary and, at the same time, complicit ways. As the narrative performance reaches the structural limit of the literary—understood as the domain of fiction—a sort of para-discursive reflection critically accompanies this performance, discussing it, ironizing it, feigning to disbelieve it, or overtly belying it. Yet the narrative doubtfully takes distance from itself, surrendering all right to a final truth at the very moment at which truth emerges, essayistic, to the surface. The authors considered—Montaigne, Swift, Lichtenberg, Kleist, Kafka, and Borges—are eminent representatives of one and the other form, and all of the works analyzed are cases of a complex interplay between narrative and essay.

Download or read book Skepticism and the Veil of Perception written by Michael Huemer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In opposition to both skeptics and representationalists, Huemer (philosophy, U. of Colorado, Boulder) presents a theory of perceptual awareness, according to which perception gives us direct awareness of real objects and non-inferential knowledge of the properties of these objects. He responds to the major arguments for skepticism, including the infinite regress argument, the problem of the criterion, the brain in the vat, and the impossibility of verification. c. Book News Inc.

Download or read book Knowledge written by Jennifer Nagel and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is knowledge? Is it the same as opinion or truth? Do you need to be able to justify a claim in order to count as knowing it? How can we know that the outer world is real and not a dream? Questions like these have existed since ancient times, and the branch of philosophy dedicated to answering them - epistemology - has been active for thousands of years. In this thought-provoking Very Short Introduction, Jennifer Nagel considers the central problems and paradoxes in the theory of knowledge and draws attention to the ways in which philosophers and theorists have responded to them. By exploring the relationship between knowledge and truth, and considering the problem of scepticism, Nagel introduces a series of influential historical and contemporary theories of knowledge, incorporating methods from logic, linguistics, and psychology, using a number of everyday examples to demonstrate the key issues and debates. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book Nietzsche s Political Skepticism written by Tamsin Shaw and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-21 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is difficult to spell out the precise political implications of Nietzsche's critique of morality. He himself never did so in any systematic way. Tamsin Shaw argues there is a reason for this: that Nietzsche's insights entail a distinctive form of political skepticism.