The problem of philosophical skepticism relates to the difficulty involved in underwriting the claim that we know anything of spatio-temporal reality. It is often claimed, in fact, that proper philosophical scrutiny reveals quite the opposite from what common sense suggests. Knowledge of external reality is thought to be even quite obviously denied to us as a result of the alleged fact that we all fail to know that certain skeptical scenarios do not obtain. A skeptical scenario is one in which (...) we have neurological occurrences just like any normal situation in which we actually perceive spatio-temporal objects, but where we are deceived in some sense as a result of the manipulation of our brains from some outside source. In this work I attempt to address the problem of philosophical skepticism by claiming that most of us are able to come to know plenty about external reality, since we can come to realize that a certain philosophical theory of perception is correct. The theory I have in mind is what I call a non-cognitive theory of perception. According to this view, perceptual experience is defined by continuous, sensitive behavioral interaction with spatio-temporal objects of the appropriate size, shape, hardness, speed, etc. Knowing that this theory of perception is correct is equivalent to knowing that we know plenty about external reality. This is ultimately because by knowing that a non-cognitive theory of perception is true, we know that any skeptical scenario must fail to obtain. The structure of the work proceeds by first discussing the significance of the problem of philosophical skepticism in some detail. Chapter 1 lays out how the problem does indeed forcefully arise if it is conceded that we fail to know that the skeptical scenarios fail to obtain. Chapter 2 develops the sort of view of our epistemological situation that falls out of accepting without qualification that the problem exists. Chapter 3 examines and criticizes certain popular responses to the skeptical problem. The main goal of these first three preliminary chapters is to indicate that once it is admitted that we fail to know that the skeptical scenarios fail to obtain, the problem of philosophical skepticism forcefully presents itself. Chapter 4, however, attacks the idea that we fail to know that the skeptical scenarios fail to obtain. In this chapter I argue that this idea is wedded to the position that a certain theory of perception is correct. The theory in question is what I call a conjunctive theory of veridical experience. According to this view, normal experience of spatio-temporal objects occurs when a subject has a certain perceptual experience, and that experience also happens to match up with and/or be satisfied by what is really the case. Only when a theory of this sort is assumed, I argue, is the claim that we fail to know that the skeptical scenarios fail to obtain found to be obvious. In chapter 5 I argue that, in fact, a non-cognitive theory, rather than a conjunctive theory, is the correct view to maintain. In the final chapter 6 I develop the epistemological position that falls out of accepting a non-cognitive theory. (shrink)

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (herein the Ethics), Simone de Beauvoir declares that science condemns itself to failure if it takes as its task the total disclosure of being (Beauvoir 1948/1976, 130). I suggest that the Ethics actually parallels the spirit of some scientific programs, specifically those that utilize positive skepticism as method. I draw out connections among the Ethics, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962) to which Beauvoir's works show much likeness, and Francis Bacon's The New Organon (Bacon (...) 1620/2000), the latter being at once a scientific and a positive skeptical program. Underscoring the ways in which Beauvoir's method of interrogating the being of beings and reality is compatible with some scientific pictures is important. It complicates the usual thought that existentialism is antiscience, problematizes Beauvoir's overly simplistic depiction of science, and nuances her analysis of the existent's experience of itself. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between epistemic relativism and Pyrrhonian scepticism. It is argued that a fundamental argument for contemporary epistemic relativism derives from the Pyrrhonian problem of the criterion. Pyrrhonian scepticism is compared and contrasted with Cartesian scepticism about the external world and Humean scepticism about induction. Epistemic relativism is characterized as relativism due to the variation of epistemic norms, and is contrasted with other forms of cognitive relativism, such as truth relativism, conceptual relativism and ontological relativism. An argument (...) from the Pyrrhonian problem of the criterion to epistemic relativism is presented, and is contrasted with three other arguments for epistemic relativism. It is argued that the argument from the criterion is the most fundamental argument for epistemic relativism. Finally, it is noted how the argument of the present paper fits with the author’s previous suggestion that a particularist response to the Pyrrhonian sceptic may be combined with a naturalistic view of epistemic warrant to meet the challenge of epistemic relativism. (shrink)

Skepticism seems to have excessive consequences: the impossibility of successful enquiry and differentiated judgment. Yet if skepticism could avoid these consequences, it would seem idle. I offer an account of moderate skepticism that avoids both problems. Moderate skepticism avoids excessiveness because skeptical reflection and ordinary enquiry are immune from one another: a skeptical hypothesis is out of place when raised with in an ordinary enquiry. Conversely, the result of an ordinary enquiry cannot be used to disprove skepticism. This ‘immunity’ can (...) be explained by theories such as contextualism, or sensitive invariantism. Moderate skepticism avoids idleness, because it can eliminate dogmatic elements from our commitments. An analogy is used to illustrate this: Consider someone who is rootless—someone who doesn't have a home. She won't take this conclusion to undermine her judgment that she is flying home for the holidays—even if she is sleeping in the guest bedroom. Similarly, a skeptic won't take the skeptical conclusion to undermine ordinary claims to know. Yet concluding that one is rootless is significant: it can shape one's commitments; for instance it can check one's nationalism. Similarly, accepting the skeptical conclusion is significant; it can undermine dogmatic commitments and ultimately bring about intellectual catharsis. (shrink)

Parallels between the ancient Hellenistic philosophies of the Stoics and Epicureans, on the one hand, and modern cognitive psychotherapy, on the other, are well known and a topic of current discussion. The present article argues that there are also important parallels between Pyrrhonism, the third of the major Hellenistic philosophies, and the currently state-of-the-art “3rd wave” cognitive-behavioral therapies in general, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (act) in particular. This provides a crucial insight into Pyrrhonism: understanding Sextus’ term adoxastos using the (...) technical act term ‘defusion’ illuminates the psychological condition of the Pyrrhonist and explains why the apraxia objection against Pyrrhonism is misguided. (shrink)

If we had a balance of reasons, where the arguments presented in favor and against the case were weighed precisely and the verdict could be pronounced in favor of the most inclined scale ... [we would have] a more valuable art than that miraculous science of producing gold.

Descartes’s arguments about the certainty of mathematics in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind cannot be understood independently of his attack on the authority of ancient authors. The author maintains this view by reading Descartes’s claims about mathematics through the lens of status theory, a framework for disputation revived by Renaissance dialecticians. Within status theory, “certainty” was closely associated with consensus. The essay shows how Descartes used status to attack the authority of the ancient authors and elevate mathematics (...) as an alternative. Descartes’s arguments about the certainty of mathematics are colored by his effort to make mathematics satisfy the demands of status-based disputation. Specifically, in order to elevate the status of mathematics, Descartes portrayed it as more common—prone to consensus—than he really believed it was. (shrink)

El articulo examina la aparente discrepancia en el pensamiento de Spinoza entre su teocentrismo epistemológico, según el cual todo es dudoso mientras desconocemos la existencia de Dios, y el principio verum index sui et falsi, según el cual la mera posesión de ideas verdaderas excluye toda incertidumbre. Lejos de contradecirse, estas dos afirmaciones constituyen en Spinoza dos aspectos correlativos del mismo planteamiento gnoseólogico. Se muestra así que la naturaleza divina no es ajena al intelecto humano y que este es capaz (...) de contemplar la realidad desde una perspectiva omnímoda, idéntica a la de Dios. (shrink)

Este libro, por un lado, propone nuevas perspectivas y materiales de estudio sobre algunos de los temas, autores y textos clásicos de la filosofía moderna; por otro lado, invita a descubrir rarezas, temas, autores y textos poco conocidos o ignorados, que lleven a renovar el canon de la filosofía moderna. Realiza una revisión crítica de las categorías empirismo y del racionalismo modernos y dedica artículos a una serie de filósofas modernas con el fin de renovar el canon filosófico moderno.

This paper offers a new interpretation of the young Spinoza’s method of distinguishing the true ideas from the false, which shows that his answer to the sceptic is not a failure. This method combines analysis and synthesis as follows: if we can say of the object of an idea which simple things underlie it, how it can be constructed out of simple elements, and what properties it has after it has been produced, doubt concerning the object simply makes no sense. (...) The paper also suggests a way in which this methodology connects to the ontology of the Ethics. (shrink)

REVIEW (1): "Jeff Kochan’s book offers both an original reading of Martin Heidegger’s early writings on science and a powerful defense of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) research program. Science as Social Existence weaves together a compelling argument for the thesis that SSK and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology should be thought of as mutually supporting research programs." (Julian Kiverstein, in Isis) ---- REVIEW (2): "I cannot in the space of this review do justice to the richness and range of Kochan's (...) discussion [...]. There is a great deal in this foundational portion of Kochan's discussion that I find tremendously interesting and engaging [...]." (David R. Cerbone, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) ---- REVIEW (3): "Science as Social Existence will be of interest not only to Heidegger scholars but to anyone engaged in science and technology studies. [...] This is an informative and original book. Kochan should be praised for his clear, pleasant-to-read prose." (Michael Butler, in CHOICE). (shrink)

Harry Collins' central argument about experimental practice revolves around the thesis that facts can only be generated by good instruments but good instruments can only be recognized as such if they produce facts. This is what Collins calls the experimenters' regress. For Collins, scientific controversies cannot be closed by the ‘facts’ themselves because there are no formal criteria independent of the outcome of the experiment that scientists can apply to decide whether an experimental apparatus works properly or not.No one seems (...) to have noticed that the debate is in fact a rehearsal of the ancient philosophical debate about skepticism. The present article suggests that the way out of radical skepticism offered by the so-called mitigated skeptics is a solution to the problem of consensus formation in science.Keywords: Argumentation; Skepticism; Sociology of science; Philosophy of science; Scientific controversies. (shrink)

According to the reading offered here, Descartes' use of the meditative mode of writing was not a mere rhetorical device to win an audience accustomed to the spiritual retreat. His choice of the literary form of the spiritual exercise was consonant with, if not determined by, his theory of the mind and of the basis of human knowledge. Since Descartes' conception of knowledge implied the priority of the intellect over the senses, and indeed the priority of an intellect operating independently (...) of the senses, and since, in Descartes' view, the untutored individual was likely to be nearly wholly immersed in the senses, a procedure was needed for freeing the intellect from sensory domination so that the truth might be seen. Hence, the cognitive exercises of the Meditations, modeled not on the sense- and imagination-based exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, but on the Augustinian procedure of turning away from the senses and imagination to perceive the unpicturable with the fleshless eye of the mind. In accordance with this reading, the function of Descartes' skeptical arguments is not to introduce skepticism so that it can be defeated but to aid the meditator in withdrawing the mind from the senses in order to attend to truths of the pure intellect. These truths then offer the basis for a new natural philosophy, including a new theory of the senses. (shrink)

Scholarly interest in Margaret Cavendish's philosophical views has steadily increased over the past decade, but her epistemology has received little attention, and no consensus has emerged; Cavendish has been characterized as a skeptic, as a rationalist, as presenting an alternative epistemology to both rationalism and empiricism, and even as presenting no clear theory of knowledge at all. This paper concludes that Cavendish was only a modest skeptic, for she believed that humans can achieve knowledge through sensitive and rational perception as (...) well as through self-knowledge and can form probable opinions through reasoning. (shrink)

It is a standing temptation for philosophers to find anticipations of their own views in the great thinkers of the past, but few have been so bold in the search for precursors, and so utterly mistaken, as Berkeley when he claimed Plato and Aristotle as allies to his immaterialist idealism. InSiris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, which Berkeley published in his old age in 1744, he reviews the leading philosophies of antiquity and finds (...) them on the whole a good deal more sympathetic to his own ideas than the ‘modern atheism’, as he calls it, of Hobbes and Spinoza or the objectionable principles of ‘the mechanic and geometrical philosophers’ such as Newton. But his strongest and, I think, his most interesting claim is that neither Plato nor Aristotle admitted ‘an absolute actual existence of sensible or corporeal things’. (shrink)

Husserl saw the Cartesian critique of scepticism as one of the eternal merits of Descartes’ philosophy. In doing so, he accepted the legitimacy of the very idea of a universal doubt, and sought to present as an alternative to it a renewed, specifically phenomenological concept of self-evidence, making it possible to obtain an unshakable foundation for the edifice of knowledge. This acceptance of the skeptical problem underlies his entire conceptual framework, both before and after the transcendental turn, and especially the (...) immanence/transcendence distinction, i.e., the very basis of intentionality. In taking as its starting point an analysis of perception, the article puts forth a certain number of phenomenological arguments in order to put into question the validity of the skeptical problem and, therefore, of the Husserlian conceptual framework; it defends, in the first place, a disjunctive conception of perception and, in the second place, a holism of experience. (shrink)

FOR NIETZSCHE, THERE IS NO TRUTH. WHAT THEN ARE WE TO SAY OF HIS DOCTRINES OF WILL TO POWER AND ETERNAL RECURRENCE WHICH SEEM TO BE HELD AS TRUTHS? THEY TOO ARE ILLUSIONS. BUT, IF SO, HOW CAN ONE HOLD THAT THESE ILLUSIONS ARE TO BE PREFERRED TO OTHER ILLUSIONS? BECAUSE THE HIGHEST STATE IS TO BE THE SOURCE OF ALL VALUE AND MEANING ONESELF WITHOUT RELYING ON AN INDEPENDENT STANDARD OF TRUTH.

General discussions of the appropriate relations between history and philosophy of science must be complemented by examinations of particular studies involving both fields. Martin Curd's attempt to illuminate the rationality of theory change through analysis of the Copernican Revolution is such a study; his work is undercut by serious flaws and actually displays an ahistorical approach. The result misleads both about the Copernican Revolution and the general problem of theory change in science. The study does illustrate several types of failing (...) that can vitiate efforts to bring historical considerations into philosophical discussion, namely, pitfalls in the characterization of theories, arguments, range of choices, and criteria. (shrink)

En la epistemología moderna, el falibilismo es una vía media entre el dogmatismo y el escepticismo. Su origen histórico se encuentra en una rama de la antigua escuela del escepticismo académico. Ya que la diferencia entre las formas fuerte y débil del falibilismo, así como la distinción entre probabilidad epistémica y verosimilitud, sólo han sido comprendidas en las últimas dos décadas, no podemos esperar encontrar formulaciones claras de dichas doctrinas entre los filósofos griegos y romanos. Pero hemos mostrado que las (...) dos ideas centrales del falibilismo –el grado de certeza y el grado de cercanía a la verdad– están presentes en la tradición escéptica al menos desde los tiempos de Cicerón. (shrink)

l'Histoire du scepticisme d'Érasme à Spinoza de Richard H. Popkin n'est pas seulement le récit des diverses doctrines sceptiques qui traversent le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle: un fil conducteur confère à l'ensemble sa cohérence. Mieux, une conception générale de la philosophie moderne sous-tend ses analyses. Selon Popkin en effet, toute la philosophie, depuis la Renaissance jusqu'aux lumières, s'est trouvée confrontée à la tâche de surmonter la «crise pyrrhonienne», née en contexte de querelle religieuse, et qui très vite s'étend à (...) tout le savoir. Popkin a ainsi proposé une interprétation originale mais peut-être aussi parfois contestable de la modernité, en particulier dans la mesure où il ne distingue pas assez nettement le scepticisme ancien du moderne, et où il ne prend pas en compte la spécificité du fidéisme. (shrink)

This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

The man generally known as Averroes—Muhammad Ibn Ahmad (c.1126–98)—was a Muslim scholar from southern Spain who came to be regarded as one of the great authorities on Aristotle's philosophy. Medieval and even later philosophers in the Scholastic tradition referred to him simply as ‘the Commentator’ just as they referred to Aristotle himself as ‘the Philosopher’. Averroes' authority as an expositor was never wholly unchallenged and, in a purely historical context, the term ‘Averroist’ should strictly be reserved for those Aristotelians who (...) followed the interpretations of Averroes rather than those of, say, Avicenna. Some of these interpretations, however, suggested beliefs that were inconsistent with acceptance of a Creator of the material world or with belief in a last judgment at which individual souls would be punished or rewarded for their life on earth. They suggested, rather, that the material world was eternal and that individual souls did not survive bodily death. This raised a general problem about what to say in the face of a conflict between faith and reason, between the teachings of the Church and the teachings of philosophy. Averroism became associated with a particular problem and with what was known as the ‘twofold truth’, according to which it is possible to admit the conflict and continue to profess a religious faith without abandoning or abridging one's commitment to philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter considers the encounter of skepticism with the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical enterprise and focuses on the intriguing feature whereby it is assimilated into this enterprise. In this period, skepticism becomes interchangeable with its other, which helps understand the proliferation of many kinds of views under its name and which forms the background for transforming skepticism into an anonymous, routine practice of raising objections and counter-objections to one’s own view. German philosophers of this era counterpose skepticism to dogmatism and (...) criticism, ancient to modern skepticism, and, importantly, conceptualize the transitions from one form to another, which forms the conceptual matrix in which new disciplinary forms, such as psychology, anthropology, and historicism contend for cultural-intellectual standing beside philosophy. I present this assimilationist trajectory by reviewing three well-known moments of this encounter of skepticism and idealism: (1) Kant’s idealization of skepticism as a floating position amidst various philosophical positions through the dialectic, polemics, systematics, and history of pure reason; (2) Fichte’s schematic conception of skepticism as a dispute of systems in the early Wissenschaftslehre following his review of the skeptic G. E. Schulze’s attacks on Critical philosophy; (3) Hegel’s historicizing conception of skepticism in the context of differences between subjective idealism and speculative thought and his early Jena review of another work by the same skeptic Schulze. (shrink)

This article offers an interpretation of Descartes’s method of doubt. It wields an examination of Descartes’s pedagogy—as exemplified by The Search for Truth as well as the Meditations—to make the case for the sincerity (as opposed to artificiality) of the doubts engendered by the First Meditation. Descartes was vigilant about balancing the need to use his method of doubt to achieve absolute certainty with the need to compensate for the various foibles of his scholastic and unschooled readers. Nevertheless, Descartes endeavored (...) to instill willful, context-independent, universal doubt across his readership. If all goes well, readers of the Meditations are like method actors; the Meditator is the character they are meant to bring to life, via the method of meditating on reasons for doubt. The article concludes with the suggestion that Descartes was the same kind of skeptic as the early Academic skeptics Arcesilaus and Carneades. (shrink)

In "The History of Sexuality", Foucault maintains that "Western man has become a confessing animal" (1990, 59), thus implying that "man" was not always such a creature. On a related point, Wittgenstein suggests that "man is a ceremonial animal" (1996, 67); here the suggestion is that human beings are, by their very nature, ritualistically inclined. In this paper I examine this crucial difference in emphasis, first by reconstructing Foucault's "genealogy" of confession, and subsequently by exploring relevant facets of Wittgenstein's later (...) thinking. While there are significant correlations between Foucault and Wittgenstein, an important disparity emerges in relation to the question of the "natural." By critically analyzing this, I show how Wittgenstein's minimal naturalism provides an important corrective to Foucault's more extravagant claims. By implication, we see why any radical relativist, historicist, and/or constructivist position becomes untenable on Wittgensteinian grounds, even though Wittgenstein himself is often read as promoting such views. (shrink)

The philosopher Donald Davidson has argued in an influential article, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” that there is no intelligible basis on which to distinguish between conceptual schemes that Kuhn and Feyerabend have treated as incommensurable or incompatible. He concludes that, given the underlying methodology of interpretation of speech behavior, we cannot be in a position to judge that others have concepts or beliefs radically different from our own. Thus, he adds, we cannot talk meaningfully about the (...) existence of conceptual schemes. I offer a historical rejoinder to Davidson, focusing on the famous seventeenth-century debate between Descartes and Gassendi regarding the use of the first-person pronoun. I show that, in this particular debate, their failure to translate the pronoun “I” was so basic and fundamental a failure that, although it turned on just one word, it forced Gassendi to question the longstanding Renaissance humanist principle of the intertranslatability of all natural languages. Could the Gassendi-Descartes debate similarly challenge Davidson’s assertion of the intertranslatability of all natural languages and his consequent denial of the existence of conceptual schemes? (shrink)

Writing about the history of science and the history of philosophy involves assumptions about the role of context and about the relationships between past and present ideas. Some historians emphasize the context, concentrating on the intellectual, personal, and social factors that affect the way earlier thinkers have approached their subject. Analytic philosophers take a critical approach, considering the logic and merit of the arguments of past thinkers almost as though they are engaging in contemporary debates. Some philosophers use the ideas (...) of historical figures to support their own philosophical agendas. Scholarly studies of the French natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) exemplify many of these .. (shrink)

This version has been superseded by the one published in Spring, 2014.

The first translation into Ukrainian and French of the article "Saber comum e ceticismo” (Common knowledge and skepticism) by Osvaldo Porchat Pereira (1933–2017), which became one of the classic sources of modern Brazilian Neopyrrhonism.

El artículo examina el papel de Crescas y Spinoza en la transición de la concepción medieval a la concepción moderna del universo. Crescas es presentado como ejemplo ilustrativo de la tensión entre aristotelismo y religión revelada y de cómo esta última provoca la disolución del aquel, allanando así el camino a la concepción moderna del universo. A continuación, se muestra cómo la concepción moderna se plasma en el pensamiento de Spinoza, el cual radicaliza algunos de sus rasgos definitorios. Esta radicalización (...) socava la noción tradicional del _Deus absconditus_ y conduce en Spinoza al remplazo de la religión por la filosofía como auténtica revelación divina. (shrink)

There is a direct relationship between epistemology and one's attitude toward those with whom one disagrees. Those who think that the truth is difficult to ascertain can be expected, other things equal, to tend to tolerate (in the sense of sympathizing with) those with whom they disagree, as the blameless victims of an opaque reality. Those who think that the truth is easy to ascertain can be expected, other things equal, to tend to be intolerant (in the sense of being (...) unsympathetic) toward those with whom they disagree, who perversely refuse to acknowledge what should be clear to any well-intentioned inquirer. However, these tendencies toward tolerant or intolerant attitudes can be offset by other factors; and they do not, in any case, necessarily dictate whether one will favor tolerant or intolerant policies regarding those toward whom one feels tolerant or intolerant. The complex relationship between epistemology, tolerant or intolerant attitudes, and tolerant or intolerant policies is evident in the thought of prominent early-modern Protestant theologians who, under the pressure of rampant and violent religious disagreement, theorized tolerance. (shrink)

It is a standing temptation for philosophers to find anticipations of their own views in the great thinkers of the past, but few have been so bold in the search for precursors, and so utterly mistaken, as Berkeley when he claimed Plato and Aristotle as allies to his immaterialist idealism. InSiris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, which Berkeley published in his old age in 1744, he reviews the leading philosophies of antiquity and finds (...) them on the whole a good deal more sympathetic to his own ideas than the ‘modern atheism’, as he calls it, of Hobbes and Spinoza or the objectionable principles of ‘the mechanic and geometrical philosophers’ such as Newton. But his strongest and, I think, his most interesting claim is that neither Plato nor Aristotle admitted ‘an absolute actual existence of sensible or corporeal things’. (shrink)

In Culture and Value Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for’. The desire for such conceptual tranquillity is a recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's work, and especially in his later ‘grammatical-therapeutic’ philosophy. Some commentators (notably Rush Rhees and C. G. Luckhardt) have cautioned that emphasising this facet of Wittgenstein's work ‘trivialises’ philosophy – something which is at odds with Wittgenstein's own philosophical ‘seriousness’ (in particular his insistence that philosophy demands that one ‘Go the bloody (...) hard way’). Drawing on a number of correlations between Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and that of the Pyrrhonian Sceptics, in this paper I defend a strong ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein, and show how this can be maintained without ‘trivialising’ philosophy. (shrink)

This essay attempts to retrieve the notion of ‘common sense’ within the writings of Descartes and Montaigne. I suggest that both writers represent distinct traditions in which the notion is employed. Descartes represents a modernist tradition in which common sense is understood to be a cognitive faculty, while Montaigne represents a humanist tradition in which common sense is understood as a political virtue. I also suggest that both writers work with the notion as a way of responding to diversity in (...) the world. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the notion of common sense employed by Descartes and Montaigne emerges out of the scholastic tradition and the assertion that both writers are responding to the educational consequences of scholasticism. I also discuss how the reconstruction of Descartes in this paper can provide some ground for raising new questions about the Cartesian project and educational philosophy. Finally, I gesture toward the idea that the humanist tradition with its understanding of common sense as political virtue can provide benefit for contemporary responses to diversity. (shrink)

This article offers a Weberian perspective on philosophy's relationship to social science research in education. Two key areas where it can make an important contribution are discussed: methodology, and the clarification of value principles that necessarily frame inquiries. In relation to both areas, it is claimed that some researchers underestimate philosophy's contribution, while others exaggerate it. Thus, in methodological work, there are those who effectively suppress philosophical issues, producing ‘methodology-as-technique’; at the same time, others generate ‘methodology-as-philosophy’, often denying the possibility (...) of knowledge, the regulative ideal of truth, and the desirability of objectivity. It is argued that both these tendencies are counterproductive: neither enables research on education to flourish. In relation to the second area, it is shown that philosophy is needed to clarify the value principles that educational researchers use to frame their inquiries; but, at the same time, that it cannot provide a value framework to govern social science. The concept of equity is discussed as an example. In summary, it is argued that while philosophy plays an essential role in social and educational inquiry, there are important limits to its contribution. (shrink)

El vínculo entre ciencias cognitivas y filosofía es fructífero y diverso. Sin embargo, son pocas las tentativas filosóficas que examinan el concepto de aprendizaje en su relación con aplicaciones para el campo educativo. El pragmatismo filosófico ofrece un marco teórico sustentable para efectuar esta tarea. Este estudio se plantea como una aproximación al concepto de aprendizaje desde el pragmatismo contemporáneo de Robert Brandom (1994, 2001). Concretamente, analiza este concepto como una instancia de la idea de ‘prácticas sociales’, a partir de (...) la concepción sobre normatividad que Brandom propone, evaluando las ventajas epistemológicas de esta postura. Al mismo tiempo, advierte las implicancias de reducir el aprendizaje a regularidades causales o naturales, tal como se desprende del abordaje cognitivista en educación. A tal fin, el artículo sitúa las filiaciones de tradición y conceptuales de la idea de ‘prácticas sociales’ en la filosofía reciente, y a partir de dicha reconstrucción muestra que es posible un abordaje del aprendizaje más allá del cognitivismo (sin cuestionar sus contribuciones posibles). Asimismo, señala los vínculos entre aprendizaje y norma, así como también entre aprendizaje y lenguaje. Como resultado, este análisis permite situar el aprendizaje formal en el marco de las prácticas sociales, explicar su naturaleza normativa y definir el tipo de condicionamiento que el lenguaje adquiere en él. (shrink)