Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Resumen: La pretensión del autor es iluminar, en contraste con los dos proyectos que dominan el panorama filosófico contemporáneo: una reconstrucción de la filosofía de corte pragmatista e historicista y una reconstrucción en filosofía que acentúa su carácter sustantivo y autónomo; algunos de los aspectos, frecuentemente ignorados, del método desarrollado por Wittgenstein en su última producción, aspectos tan radicales como novedosos.
Pretendemos, por tanto: (i) Mostrar que, de acuerdo con Wittgenstein, la fuente de la inquietud filosófica es la existencia de imágenes inconscientes que funcionan como normas de representación absorbidas dentro de las formas de nuestro lenguaje y que excluyen posibilidades alternativas. Estos símiles fijan cómo las cosas deben y cómo no pueden ser. (ii) Demostrar que la finalidad del método filosófico diseñado por Wittgenstein es cambiar nuestras representaciones y reemplazar viejos hábitos de pensamiento, esto es, que su meta es la creación de nuevos objetos de comparación y la yuxtaposición de símiles con el objeto de quebrar la fascinación que una analogía única ejerce sobre nuestra inteligencia. (iii) Subrayar que los modelos de presentación carecen de valor de verdad; que la imaginación es esencial en la práctica del método wittgensteiniano; que su consecuencia es la libertad intelectual y que, en la medida en que al concebir como absurdo un problema filosófico se alcanza lo que podría denominarse “una suspensión de interés”, la estrategia de Wittgenstein es análoga a la formulada y ejemplificada por el pirronismo. 

Palabras clave: Actitud reformista en filosofía - Actitud revolucionaria en filosofía - Método de representación - Modelos alternativos - Normatividad - Pirronismo - Presentación perspicua - Suspensión de interés - Terapia - Wittgenstein.

Abstract: The author aims at shedding light, against the background of two projects which share the whole present philosophical landscape: a “reconstruction of philosophy” inspired by pragmatism and historicism and a “reconstruction in philosophy” defending the autonomous and substantive character of philosophical theses and methods; on some neglected aspects of Wittgenstein’s late method, aspects so much radical as novel.
Therefore, we pretend: (i) To show that, according to Wittgenstein, the source of philosophical disquiet is the existence of unconscious pictures which function as norms of representation deeply ingrained in our thinking and which exclude alternative possibilities. They fix how things must and cannot be. (ii) To demonstrate that the philosophical method Wittgenstein envisages tries to change someone’s way of looking at things and to replace entrenched habits of thinking by new ones, that is, it tries to create new objects of comparison and to juxtapose pictures with pictures in order to break the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of an unique analogy. (iii) To stress that analogies are not true or false; that imagination is essential to practising Wittgenstein’s method; that its consequence is intellectual freedom and that, because coming to see that a philosophical problem is meaningless we reach what might be called “a suspension of concern”, this purge of our philosophical anxieties resembles the persuasive use of arguments in Pyrrhonism.

Key words: Alternative Models - Method of Representation - Normativity - Perspicuous Presentation - Pyrrhonism - Reforming Attitude in Philosophy - Revolutionary Attitude in Philosophy - Suspension of Concern - Therapy - Wittgenstein.

The outlines of Pyrrhonism in the testimony of Aristocles

The testimony of Aristocles (Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 14.18.1-4) allows for two different and incompatible interpretations of Pyrrho's philosophical stance. On the one hand, his claim for a happy life without opinions might result from his second-order endorsement of a thesis of metaphysical indeterminacy. On the other hand, it is possible to argue that he motivated suspension of judgement by pointing to the insufficiency of the human capacity for knowledge. In my paper, I give a brief overview of these two types of reading, their philosophical and textual merits, and their import for the question whether Pyrrho was a genuine forerunner of the later Pyrrhonist movement.


A pürrhóni filozófia alapvonalai az arisztoklészi testimóniumban

Az Arisztoklész-testimónium (Euszebiosz, Felkészítés az Evangéliumra 14.18.1-4) alapján két eltérő és összeegyeztethetetlen Pürrhón-értelmezés bontható ki. Az egyik szerint Pürrhón sajátos, a dolgok meghatározatlanságára vonatkozó metafizikai nézete alapján szorgalmazta a vélekedés nélküli életet, a másik szerint viszont az emberi megismerőképesség elégtelen volta miatt gondolta úgy, hogy minden kérdésben fel kell függesztenünk ítéletünket. A tanulmányban áttekintem a két értelmezéstípus legfontosabb változatait, filozófiai és nyelvi megalapozottságukat, illetve a későbbi pürrhónikus mozgalomhoz való viszonyukat.

‘Hegel and scepticism’ remains an intriguing topic directly concerning the logical and methodological core of Hegel’s system and its formation. Hegel’s thought evolved through his vivid involvement in the vigorous debates over scepticism that took place in Germany around 1800. His strategy did not consist of any fatal immediate confrontation with scepticism. On the contrary, he aimed to immunize philosophy against the threat of scepticism by integrating the latter into the former as its negative and free moment. Hegel’s interpretation of Sextus’ five tropes remains invaluable for his attempt to form a philosophical system that sublates both dogmatism and scepticism. A series of contributions is unfolding around a keynote paper by Klaus Vieweg – a prominent Hegel scholar who has devoted much of his academic work to the historical and systematic relationship between Hegel and scepticism – which tries to understand and restate the limits and the content of this relationship. Various Hegel readers with different theoretical concerns are dealing with Hegel’s strategy in a large range of areas from logic and epistemology to political philosophy, aesthetics and the history of science.

This article is concerned with some of the criteria which Hegel believes apply to a scientific treatment of logic. I briefly address criteria which I take Hegel to inherit from traditional rationalism before focusing on two fairly idiosyncratic criteria: the requirement that a science of logic exhibit a circular structure and that it begin with the concept of pure being. I offer an explanation of these criteria which understands them as motivated by anti-sceptical concerns, before arguing that Hegel's mature treatment of the latter criterion is problematically ambiguous.

This chapter begins by tracing the complex argumentation of Meditation One. The second section explores the differences between Cartesian skeptical arguments and the skeptical arguments discussed in the ancient world, while the third section considers whether there might be medieval antecedents for the radical doubts that end Meditation One. The final section suggests that the radical nature of the doubts raised in Meditation One has its sources in two fundamental characteristics of Cartesian science: the radical error that Cartesian science posits in our everyday experience of the world, and the hypothetical and (only) morally certain nature of the scientific edifice that is proposed to replace the commonsense view of the world enshrined in Aristotelian science.

This is a selection from the Polish translation of Sextus Empiricus' Against the Physicists. Against the Ethicists (AM IX-XI)

1. Introduction
2. AM IX - beginning of On the gods
3. AM X - On place and movement (partly)
4. Introduction into the treatise Against the Ethicists

I argue that the central methodological problem Hegel addresses in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit is Sextus Empiricus’s “Dilemma of the Criterion,” a dilemma purporting to show that no criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood can be established. I show that the Dilemma is especially pressing for any epistemology that, like Hegel’s, rejects ‘knowledge by acquaintance,’ aims to avoid dogmatism, and retains a realist, correspondence conception of truth. Hegel’s response to the dilemma appears to beg the question. I argue that a careful disambiguation of some of Hegel’s key phrases shows that he developed a sophisticated response to this dilemma that does not beg the question. On Hegel’s view, the internal coherence of a ‘form of consciousness’ (explained herein) entails that the principle conceptions of knowledge and of the objects of knowledge comprised by that ‘form of consciousness’ are true of actual knowledge and of the actual objects of knowledge. I indicate why this criterion can be made to work at the broad categorial level of Hegel’s inquiry although it does not apply to problems of theory selection faced in philosophy of science. I begin by showing that Sextus’ Dilemma has not been adequately resolved by Chisholm, Alston, Moser, or Fogelin, although their efforts are instructive about the genuine difficulties involved in the Dilemma of the Criterion.

Cartesian scepticism seeks to exploit what it sees as a gap between the subjectivity of experience and the objectivity of the world which it purports to represent.In this chapter I examine whether the philosophical context within which the ancient Pyrrhonisst worked was one which took subjectivity to be a feature of perceptual experience, and I shall try to show that, in so far as it does not, the motivation for ancient scepticism rests on a different understanding of the problem of justification than that identified by Nagel as the problem for epistemology. If this contention is correct, then some light will be shed on, amongst other things, the unwillingness of ancient scepticism to bring into doubt the existence of the external world.

A Meta-Philosophy exploration of immanent and non-immanent  features of  first-order philosophy in terms of the values of non- values or negative values of Radical Scepticism, Nihilism and Minarchy, executed to show how philosophizing is done.

It misleadingly seems as if there is no progress in philosophy as, like in visual art, literature and music, each original thinker re-invents the entire discipline, its aims, purposes, values, methods,
etc
The nature of philosophical tools, methods, techniques and skills will be investigated and applied in terms of radical scepticism.

This approach, set of values and attitude restrict the nature and the style of the meta-philosophizing. It will for example prevent the traditional development of a general, all-encompassing and all-inclusive metaphysical system. It also demands the focus on context-specific investigation of questions and the dealing of a particular problem in a certain context.

These limits require the re-interpretation of any philosophical tool
being employed as well as the underlying assumptions and any pre-suppositions.

As far as possible philosophizing as an aspect of the processes of theorizing will be adhered to and realized. In chapter THREE I illustrate many-leveled and multi-dimensional thinking, that are to me as a visual artist as well, of extreme importance. These are the types of things employed by radical skepticism and that should be the form of philosophizing instead of and replacing traditional one-leveled and one-dimensional thinking, argumentation and reasoning

In this essay, I propose that there is at least one modern theory that has adopted the approach of Pyrrhonian Skepticism as outlined by Sextus Empiricus (third century CE), namely the brand of Behaviorism, associated with the name of Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990), which has become known as Radical Behaviorism. The parallels between the two systems have to do with two aspects of the Skeptic programme, its approach to daily life, and its view of language as the product of conditioning and habituation. Both aspects are closely connected to ethical matters.

The goal of this article is twofold. First, it revises the historiographic partition proposed by John Deely in Four Ages of Understanding (2001) by arguing that the moment marking the beginning of philosophical Modernity has been vividly recorded in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy with the experiment with the wax. Second, an upshot of this historical study is that it helps make sense of Deely’s somewhat iconoclastic use of the words “subject” and “subjectivity” to designate mind-independent worldly things. The hope is that successfully accomplishing these twin tasks will give semiotic inquiry a better appreciation of its own history, as well as resources genial to furthering its ongoing development.

What, if anything, is the correlation between the specialized or technical ideas of the philosopher and the rest of his existence? His everyday life outside his philosophical role.
In the specialized reality and reality constitution, when employing the discourse and discipline of philosophy, the philosopher subscribe to many things in an explicit manner and he employs a number of implicit things and assumptions that are not stated explicitly.
These things concern the different branches, areas and domains of the philosophical discourse, for example metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, ontology, cognition, consciousness, mind, perception, thinking, etc.
Is there a relation between these technical 'beliefs' of the philosopher and other, not philosophical areas of his existence? Does and can all of his non-philosophical existence reflect his philosophical beliefs, statements and expressions? Is it possible that the everyday existence or life world of the philosopher can resemble, confirm and express his philosophical ideas? If this is not the case, what are the factors that are involved in such discrepancies?

Do they imply a lack of integrity, of wholeness of integration on behalf of the philosopher? What are the causes of such an illogical or surprising lack of compatibility or similarity between these sets of two or more facts? What are the things that we can look for in such a lack of compatibility – things such as the following? -
inconsistency, difference, disparity, variance, variation, deviation, divergence,

disagreement, dissimilarity, dissimilitude, mismatch, lack of similarity, contrariety, contradictoriness, disaccord, discordance, incongruity,

lack of congruence, incompatibility, irreconcilability, conflict, opposition?

I illustrate the above by means of four examples.
1 Let us assume that the embodied human person consists of both voluntary and involuntary processes and activities. Do the philosophy of an individual reflect or express these activities or is it completely or partially unrelated to them? Do the voluntary processes and activities or the voluntary aspects of perception, cognition, brain processes and other activities resemble or express the philosophy of a thinker? 2 Some thinkers are seriously concerned about the importance of discourse and dialogue and the equality of all those involved. We find their concern about the ideal discourse and dialogue described in their written work and talks, but to what an extend do their own discursive and dialogical actions and behaviour reflect the ideal situation they preach?
3 Ethics and morality can be find in and are emphasized in all sorts of disciplines, of course they are major subjects in providing ways to live off for philosophers and we even find institutions devoted to their teaching and investigation. Do the lives, the lived morality and ethics of those individuals who preach the ideals of ethics or ethical ideals reflect the ideals they preach and that provides them with ways to earn a living? Or, is it the case that morality and ethics are merely faked by those individuals living off their preaching of ethics? And, that they merely employ the values, norms, customs and attitudes of a culture, sub-culture, community, group or another social grouping? In other words are the preachers of ethics really more ethical than the rest of the community and society?
4 When the philosopher expresses his ideas by means of all sorts of philosophical tools he is aware of the fact that he employs them, or at least aware of some of them being intentionally employed by him while he is unaware of others that he employs. Do the tools the philosopher employs to theorize (identify problems, the nature of the questions he asks, the nature of his ways of questioning, the assumptions he makes, the forming and testing of hypotheses, the making of generalizations, etc) or philosophize (perceive things, think, think about things, reason, argumentation etc) resemble what he beliefs, asserts and says about thinking, perception, cognition, understanding, subjects, objects, relationships between subjects and objects and other features and processes of epistemology?
In short – does the lived philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics etc of the philosopher resemble, represent, confirm, substantiate, back, endorse, support, authenticate and corroborate the ideas, assertions and speculations that are expressed by the statements his philosophy or philosophizing consist of? Does he walk the walk of his talk? Are they similar and identical, the same things and merely expressions of the same things in different mediums?

Expanded version of paper delivered at the International conference "Heraklit von Ephesos und seine Zeit" (7-12 Oktober 2013, Selcuk Municipality, Turkey), in:  „Heraklit im Kontext” hrsg. von Enrica Fantino, Ulrike Muss, Charlotte Schubert, Kurt Sier", Studia Praesocratica Bd. 8, De Gruyter, 2017, 231-267.

          A.Lebedev, Metaphor of Liber Naturae and Alphabet Analogy in Heraclitus' Logos-Fragments (Abstract)

  This article criticizes both the traditional metaphysical interpretation of Heraclitus’ notion of logos (logos as divine reason, universal law etc.) and the widespread verbalist interpretation (logos as the discource of Heraclitus humself). On the basis of the systematical study of Heraclitus’ metaphorical language a new interpretation is proposed that takes the phrase “this logos” in the beginning of Heraclitus’ book as a metaphor of “book of nature” with a referential meaning “Universe”. This interpretation was known in antiquity and is attested by a group of ancient sources including Plato (λόγος σημαίνει τὸ πᾶν) and the Stoic source of Philo Alexandrinus who ascribes to Heraclitus the notion of τὰ τῆς φύσεως γράμματα. The metaphor of book of nature is a part of a more complex metaphorical model based on the grammarical or alphabet analogy between speech or text (logos in grammatical sense)  and  the external world. In Greek grammar “logos” (both phonetic speech and written text)  is analyzed into “syllables”,  syllables into “letters”, stoicheia (later this term came to denote “elements”). In this analogy “letters” correspond to separate elementary opposites of the physical world, syllables to their combinations and “logos” to the total sum of all “syllables”, i.e. to the Universe. The metaphor of “book of nature” in Heraclitus has both epistemological-metaphysical, and ethical-political as well as a theological dimension.  First of all its purpose is to explain the fundamental thesis of Heraclitus’ metaphysics about the identity of opposites and the unity of the cosmos: all visible phenomena (τὰ φανερά) without a single exception form pairs of opposites which should be “joined together” in thought, and the resultig “syllables”  should be all incorporated into a single Logos which is the only true reality, τὸ ξυνόν. Reading the book of nature is like killing the lice: the more you “grap”, the less is left (against polymathia of the positive science of  the Milesians).  Wisdom consists in knowing all things as one (ἓν πάντα εἰδέναι keeping the MSS reading εἰδέναι). At the same time it contains a hidden polemics against the mechanistic physics of the Milesians (Anaximander). The physical cosmos should be “read” and interpreted like a book rather than explained by mechanistic causes. It has not been produced by a blind vortex of the dead matter, but created by the divine fire endowed with consciousness and providential reason. When interpreted correctly it displays the Cosmopolis or the City of Zeus perfectly governed by the divine Mind (Gnome). The Cosmopolis is the divine paradigm for ideal legislation in the human world. Polytheism and democracy (the rule of “many”) go “against nature” and therefore should be replaced by monotheism and the rule of “one the best”, i.e. philosopher-king. Heraclitus can be ragarded as the author of the first Greek political utopia as well as the proponent of the first consistent and well-argued theory of natural law. Heraclitus’ book was written during or after the Ionian revolt (499 – 494 BC) and contained an appeal to Ionian Greeks to overcome the local separatism of the multiple city-states and to create a unfied federal Greek state in order to fight against the Achaemenid empire. The unifying common cult, accordung to Heraclitus, had to become that of Apollo the Sun. The words “attending not to mine logos…” (but to the logos of the Universe, i.e. to divine command) in the incipit of Heraclitus’ book is a prophetic formula: Heraclitus speaks as a prophet of Apollo.

On the one hand, Hume accepts the view—which he attributes primarily to Stoicism—that there exists a determinate best and happiest life for human beings, a way of life led by a figure whom Hume calls “the true philosopher.” On the other hand, Hume accepts that view—which he attributes to Scepticism—that there exists a vast plurality of good and happy lives, each potentially equally choiceworthy. In this paper, I reconcile Hume’s apparently conflicting commitments: I argue that Hume’s “Sceptical” pluralism about the character of the happiest life need not conflict with his “Stoic” advocacy of the supreme happiness of the true philosopher, given Hume’s flexible understanding of how one might live as a true philosopher.

En el presente trabajo hemos tratado de exponer una visión unitaria de la génesis del pensamiento escéptico en su doble vertiente histórica y temática. Por ello, la estructuración interna evita el mero orden cronológico intentando, por el contrario, agrupar las corrientes objeto de estudio en función de la proximidad de sus contenidos doctrinales y también del modo de comprensión de estos contenidos por parte de la propia tradición escéptica. Así, la aproximación a la filosofía escéptica que aquí se ofrece pretende especialmente clarificar el decurso de la línea filosófica que, según el propio escepticismo, se inicia en los albores de la tradición griega y que termina dando lugar al corpus ideológico de la escuela pirrónica a partir de Enesidemo. La comprensión de este decurso filosófico se muestra como requisito previo imprescindible para cualquier investigación que pretenda poner en claro los presupuestos y categorías subyacentes a la filosofía escéptica. Por ello, hemos tratado de analizar y discutir con detenimiento las nociones fundamentales que funcionan como marco de referencia del pensamiento pirrónico, así como el papel que cada una de ellas desempeña en la concepción filosófica escéptica en su conjunto. Nuestra intención fundamental ha sido la de trazarnos como línea de investigación uno de los aspectos a nuestro entender más interesantes de la concepción filosófica que caracteriza a la corriente escéptica: el alcance teórico y las características específicas de su posición, determinadas por el tipo de supuestos con los que el filósofo escéptico cuenta a la base de su actividad.

This essay explores the philosophical reasons why successful attempts to overturn domination and dogmatism only seem to result in the emergence of new forms of domination and dogmatism, and thus in political disappointment.  It is argued that the epistemic key to this problem is to be found in Pyrrhonian scepticism.  To begin, the way dialectic developed so as to be understood, in Hegel, as a response to this problem, is examined.  How this was then forgotten in Marx is explored through Lucio Colletti’s flawed critique of Hegelian Marxism.  The essay concludes that political thought, if it truly aspires to overturn domination and dogmatism, should address itself directly to the sceptical problem by adopting a Left Pyrrhonian dialectical strategy.

I show how Karl Popper reconciled scepticism with epistemology and how he retrogressed when he identified truth as our epistemic aim. I criticise David Miller's defence of Popper's error and I consider and rebut objections, derived from Popper and Miller, to a purely sceptical epistemology.

This article is focused on answering the question to what extent one can be a sceptic. Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism serves as a guide. In section 1, it is investigated whether three logical laws have a certain foundation or are subject to doubt. In section 2, Sextus’s way to deal with these laws is examined; the question arises how dogmatic his approach is. After that, a possible ‘reply’ by Sextus to the criticism receives attention. Section 3 is concentrated on a possible alternative to Sextus’s approach. Besides logical laws, some important methods are concerned.

Despite their divergences, I argue that Sextus, Montaigne, and Hume are committed to several substantive points of commonality and that these commonalities justify us in speaking of them as belonging to a unitary Pyrrhonist tradition. In this tradition, Pyrrhonizing doubt serves to chart the boundary of that-which-resists-doubt, thereby simultaneously charting the shape of that complex of nature and custom which constitutes the bedrock of human life—the life that remains after doubt has done its worst.

One might expect that a paper concerning R. D. Laing's enigmatic relationship with and contribution to psychoanalysis would examine Laing's impact on the psychoanalytic community in England, where Laing lived and practiced, and in the United States, where he enjoyed enormous popularity throughout most of his career (though it had significantly waned by the time of his death in 1989). Were this my objective I would be faced with a quandary because, in fact, Laing enjoyed
relatively little, if any, impact on the psychoanalytic community in either England or the United States. Indeed, rather than assume Laing's influence, one must ask, What has R. D. Laing contributed to psychoanalysis, in the widest possible meaning of this question? Is there, for example, a Laingian theory that delineates his conception of psychoanalysis? Or can we point to a Laingian technique that Laing counseled others to follow? Despite his enormous contribution to contemporary thought, it must be admitted that there is neither a Laingian theory nor technique that pertains to his way of conducting psychoanalytic treatment or, for that matter, any form of treatment whatsoever. Nevertheless, Laing was trained as a psychoanalyst at the British Psychoanalytic Institute and, though he drifted away from the psychoanalytic community following the completion of his training, he continued to call himself a psychoanalyst on the back of his book jackets and elsewhere for the restof his life.

I argue for a new reading of Pyrrhonian beliefs inspired by representationalism (the content view) in recent philosophy of mind. I shall argue that there are two senses of acceptance or "acquiescence in something" (eudokein tini pragmati) rather than two senses of belief (doxa). For this reason, we can maintain along with Sextus that the Pyrrhonian skeptic behaves intentionally and can live his life in society adoxastôs without any proper beliefs whatsoever. However, the skeptical sense of acceptance is not the mere avowal of a feeling or a mere report or register of the way things appear to me. I want to suggest the following reading. Acceptance without belief is an anti-predicative passive and involuntary acceptance of content by means of an indicator function (pathos or phainomenon) in virtue of the past regular connection between the representational content and the indicator function. The pathos (as a present state of mind) or the phainomenon "means" (that is, indicates) passively and involuntarily a content in virtue of its regular connection with this content through time. For example, the Pyrrhonian's acceptance of the content of the sentence "there is fire" is based on the fact that he here and now perceives smoke and that pathos passively and involuntarily means (represents) the content that there is fire. There is no judgment involved at all: even when the skeptic suspends his judgment (epochê) about whether there is fire, his pathos makes him involuntarily accept that there is fire. That is what Sextus, following the Stoic tradition, calls "commemorative signs" (hupomnêstikon) in opposition to the so-called "indicative signs" (endeiktikon), namely the "internal assertion" of the content as a belief (as a propositional attitude). As I do not believe that any reasonable reading of the skeptical acceptance may be defended only by means of philological analysis and by the research of the huge doxography, my arguments deliberately mix historical evidence with reasons of a systematic nature. In this way, the defense of my alternative reading is abductive, namely as the inference to the best explanation.

Psychoanalysis is both a collection of ideas and a method, based upon those ideas, whose goal is the right way to live. Hence, psychoanalysis is an " ethic " in the sense that it concerns the manner by which individuals conduct themselves. Derived from the Greek ethike tekhne, meaning " the moral art, " ethike is in turn derived from the Greek ethos, meaning " character. " Both the character of a person who aspires to behave ethically and the customs of a people by which one's standards are measured, derive from the concept. Morality, a subsidiary of ethics, pertains to distinctions between right and wrong and good and bad, whereas ethics, according to the Greeks, concerns the pursuit of happiness, the nature of which produces a state of equanimity by conferring freedom from mental anguish. If psychoanalysis is an ethical system whose goal is liberation from psychic conflict, then the nature of that conflict must have something to do with the way one lives, thinks, and behaves. While the character of an individual is no doubt decisive in the outcome of a person's treatment, the psychoanalytic experience essentially revolves around a kind of work that is performed and accomplished, the outcome of which succeeds or fails. By analyzing the customs of a given patient—the manner by which that individual lives—he or she is in a better position to change what needs to be changed and discover a better life. If psychoanalysis is an ethic, then what kind of ethic does it foster? What are the rules by which its ethic is administered and what is the basis of its method?

This chapter presents Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy as modern fictions with ancient-skeptical ambitions.  Whether in the affective domain (Flaubert) or in the cognitive (Beckett), the aim is to help the reader achieve a position of studied neutrality—ataraxia, époché—thanks not to an a priori decision but to the mutual cancellation of opposing tendencies.  Understanding Flaubert and Beckett in this way allows us, first, to enrich our sense of what “catharsis” may involve; second, to see why the apparently odious Charles, in Madame Bovary, suddenly becomes a deeply touching figure; and third, to recognize the severe limitations of empathy-based moralist theories of fiction.

Bas van Fraassen’s ‘Constructive Empiricism’, first presented in The Scientific Image (1980), has rightly stimulated widespread and searching discussion and rejoinder. Yet something very fundamental remains to be appreciated about van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism and how he advocates it. I say ‘advocates’ advisedly, not only because van Fraassen’s view is voluntarist, but because it is decidedly pyrrhonist – in exactly the voluntarist strain of fideism tracing back to Augustine. To exhibit how this is so, I first review briefly some main Pyrrhonist tropes, the Dilemma of the Criterion and Pyrrhonism’s key basis step (§2). I then summarise my reasons for suggesting that Constructive Empiricism is Pyrrhonism on the sly (§3). To substantiate my suggestion I recount van Fraassen’s empiricist stance (§4), his own sceptical tropes (§5) and the key basis step of his Constructive Empiricism (§6). I then conclude with some philosophical reflections upon method, scepticism and the decisive philosophical importance of historical philosophy (§7). Despite the ‘retreat’ from The Scientific Image announced in an appendix to Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (2008), we shall see that the same basic Pyrrhonist tendencies persist throughout van Fraassen’s empiricist stance.

Articles
Jon ALTSCHUL, Epistemic Deontologism and Role-Oughts
Benoit GAULTIER, An Argument Against the Possibility of Gettiered Beliefs
Michael S. PERRY, Externalism, Skepticism, and Belief
Pierre UZAN, Logique quantique et intrication

Debate
Michael DA SILVA, KK and the Knowledge Norm of Action
Franz HUBER, What is the Permissibility Solution a Solution of? – A Question for Kroedel
Moti MIZRAHI, Phenomenal Conservatism and Self-defeat Arguments: A Reply to Huemer
Timothy PERRINE, Against Kornblith Against Reflective Knowledge

Giuseppe Veltri (1958-) da decenni porta avanti un’originale ricerca sul dubbio e lo scetticismo nell’ambito dell’ebraismo (oltre a numerose altre, sempre feconde di risultati). In questo mio scritto, che racchiude e amplia due articoli-recensioni di recente pubblicati, prendo in esame altrettanti tra i principali lavori recenti di Veltri, ordinario di Ebraistica presso l’Università di Amburgo e direttore nonché fondatore, dal 2015, del Maimonides Center for Advanced Study; lavori che riguardano tematiche ampliamente affini, ma che presentano un discorso prospettico molto diverso, come del resto mondo differente è l’ambito cronologico toccato rispettivamente nell’uno, e nell’altro lavoro. Ma mentre l’uno – tenendo ben presente il discorso sullo scetticismo, ovviamente – non pone il discorso scettico al centro della narrazione, concentrandosi piuttosto sull’ebraismo nel Rinascimento italiano europeo (“rinascimento” esteso fino al tardo Seicento), il secondo invece tocca la storia delle origini dello scetticismo ebraico a partire dal mondo classico fino al tardo Ottocento, in un affascinante percorso millenario, ove però il momento rinascimentale, come cercherò di mostrare qui, giuoca un ruolo di primo piano, fulcro, o quasi, dell’intera costruzione storico-filosofica, e teologica. Si tratta dunque – anche se indagare sulle reali intenzioni del loro autore – di due testi profondamente, e necessariamente complementari, come in fondo cerco di dimostrare, ancorché indirettamente, in questo mio contributo.
Il Rinascimento, gli ebrei, lo scetticismo.

Comparing philosophies across time is a tricky business. Pyrrhonian Skepticism and Skinner's Radical Behaviorism are two philosophies wide apart in time and space, and, at first sight, a comparison between them does not seem promising. In this paper I propose to compare the views of these two philosophies on language and communication. Both regard all behavior, including speaking, as the product of a habituation process. Living and speaking are performed without any underlying intention or meaning. As a result, both philosophies have to defend themselves against charges of a lack of moral values.

While the Academic sceptics followed the plausible as a criterion of truth and guided their practice by a doxastic norm, so thinking that agential performances are actions for which the agent assumes responsibility, the Pyrrhonists did not accept rational belief-management, dispensing with judgment in empirical matters. In this sense, the Pyrrhonian Sceptic described himself as not acting in any robust sense of the notion, or as ‘acting’ out of sub-personal and social mechanisms. The important point is that the Pyrrhonian advocacy of a minimal conception of ‘belief’ was motivated by ethical concerns: avoiding any sort of commitment, he attempted to preserve his peace of mind. In this article, I argue for a Cartesian model of rational guidance that, in line with some current versions of an agential virtue epistemology, does involve judgment and risk, and thus which is true both to our rational constitution and to our finite and fallible nature. Insofar as epistemic humility is a virtue of rational agents that recognise the limits of their judgments, Pyrrhonian scepticism, and a fortiori any variety of naturalism, is unable to accommodate this virtue. This means that, in contrast to the Cartesian model, the Pyrrhonist does not provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of cognitive disintegration. The Pyrrhonist thus becomes a social rebel, one that violates the norm of serious personal assent that enables the flourishing of a collaborative and social species which depends on agents that, however fallible, are accountable for their actions and judgments.

Epistemology is, roughly, the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope. What is the status of epistemological claims? Relativists regard the status of (at least some kinds of) epistemological claims as, in some way, relative--viz., that the truths which (some kinds of) epistemological claims aspire to are relative truths. Self-described relativists vary, sometimes dramatically, in how they think about relative truth and what a commitment to it involves. Section 1 outlines some of these key differences and distinguishes between broadly two kinds of approaches to epistemic relativism. Proposals under the description of traditional epistemic relativism are the focus of Sections 2-4. These are, (i) arguments that appeal in some way to the Pyrrhonian problematic; (ii) arguments that appeal to apparently irreconcilable disagreements (e.g., as in the famous dispute between Galileo versus Bellarmine); and (iii) arguments that appeal to the alleged incommensurability of epistemic systems or frameworks. New (semantic) epistemic relativism, a linguistically motivated form of epistemic relativism defended in the most sophistication by John MacFarlane (e.g., 2014), is the focus of Sections 5-6.  According MacFarlane’s brand of epistemic relativism, whether a given knowledge-ascribing sentence is true depends on the epistemic standards at play in what he calls the context of assessment, which is the context in which the knowledge ascription (e.g., ‘Galileo knows the earth revolves around the sun’) is being assessed for truth or falsity. Because the very same knowledge ascription can be assessed for truth or falsity from indefinitely many perspectives, knowledge-ascribing sentences do not get their truth values absolutely, but only relatively. The entry concludes by canvassing some of the potential ramifications this more contemporary form of epistemic relativism has for projects in mainstream epistemology.

From the very beginning of hinge epistemology, its advocates have noted certain similarities between Wittgenstein’s thought and that of Hume. They have also, however, accused Hume of ultimately remaining too sceptical and too metaphysical to be enlisted to the cause. I have defended Hume against the second charge
elsewhere. Here, I wish to focus on his epistemology and, more particularly, his account of justification. I shall argue that Hume’s account of how justification comes to an
end is proto-Wittgenstein in numerous respects. It is anti-sceptical without being rationalistic; it is accompanied by an account of how explanation comes to an end that places human practices and the animal behaviour that they grow  from at its centre; it is an early form of hinge epistemology. The first part of this essay is devoted to showing the Hume is a hinge epistemologist. The second half considers what kind of hinge epistemologist he is. The third and final part looks at what contemporary hinge epistemologists can learn from Hume.

In this article I consider Sextus’ account of the Five Modes and of the Two Modes in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism. I suggest that from these we can derive the basic form of a number of different problems which I refer to as “Agrippan problems”, where this category includes both the epistemic regress problem and the problem of the criterion. Finally, I suggest that there is a distinctive Agrippan problem present at the beginning of Hegel’s Science of Logic.

The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. This volume addresses the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers from the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy.