Skepticism - In Our Time

hello in one of his earliest works the poor say philosophic of 1746 the French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote a thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it something that has never been examined dispassionately has never been properly examined hence skepticism is the first step towards truth litora was writing about a philosophical tradition which emerged in ancient Greece and which has been important ever since skepticism is the idea that it may be impossible to know anything with complete certainty one early Greek skeptic claimed that nothing can be known not even this skepticism was rediscovered during the Middle Ages and it's been of key importance to scientific religious and political thought since the Renaissance with me to discuss the philosophy of skepticism are - Alain professor of politics at Princeton University jeweled krei professor of the history of Renaissance philosophy and librarian and the Warburg Institute University of London and Peter Milliken Gilbert Ryle fellow and professor of philosophy at Hartford College Oxford Peter Milliken can you distinguish win everyday use of skepticism and skepticism that is as it is described in philosophy yes I think in everyday use a skeptic is often thought to be someone who denies some Orthodox view so a skeptic in religion or a global warming skeptic or a skeptic about evolution maybe someone who simply disagrees with the majority but in philosophy skepticism tends to be more about doubt than about negative assertion so it's not so much denying some orthodox view as questioning it and obviously there's quite a spectrum of possibilities there within philosophy skepticism can be specific so you can get skepticism say about the external world do we really know that there's a there's a world beyond our appearances skepticism about induction do we have any reason for believing that the future will resemble the past and skepticism about things like morality and religion but historically skepticisms probably been most influential in philosophy as a general view so not about one or two specific thing but rather an attitude of doubt towards just about everything can you just develop the ideas let's get give this a sort of that was a them rapid overview can you give us a rather longer overview of what we're going to be discussing what skepticism and the philosophical sense of the word what areas it's it's led to in discussions right um well scepticism has been around for a long time and in the ancient world it took this global form and it was combined with a view of a certain ideal of form of life so the thought was that by doubting everything by being under Matic one could reach a kind of tranquillity now when it came forward into the modern world it came through in a period where it was casting doubt on a lot of things that were highly controversial particularly in the context of religious debates and that sort of thing so it had a very big effect in casting serious doubt on all sorts of things that people were very concerned about and then it got developed by particular thinkers that we'll be talking about particularly people like Descartes and Hume came through into the contemporary world as a very living force because those arguments that they were providing seemed so hard to challenge and you've got to the very essential nature of what is knowledge itself and is there such a thing as certain knowledge anywhere yes exactly I mean it tends to suggest if you take the skeptical argument seriously and and some of them are very difficult indeed to defeat but we can't know all sorts of things that we wish we did like for example proof of the external world turns out to be much more difficult than you might think or proving that science has a solid basis that we can reliably glean laws about the universe from our observations all that sort of thing has a very real concern and obviously also in in areas like morality and religion Skeptical worries tend to be particularly strong where you've got a lot of real different differences of opinion and essentially what the skeptical arguments are doing is saying none of you have good reason for what you're asserting so it's it's a very troubling and and upsetting sort of theme and still two and a half thousand years on quite a live as a subject in philosophy I very much they miss Elaine can you go back now to the origins of skeptical sort escapes in Greek means investigation and and those investigations might lead you on the one hand to a kind of modesty about what you think you might know and on the other hand to a kind of relativism and I think those were two of the key origins so the modesty comes especially from Socrates who in Plato's apology is depicted as saying what I do not know I do not think I know and that sometimes loss does I know that I know nothing so there's a kind of modesty about the limits of wizz of knowledge true wisdom comes from the limits of knowledge but then on the other hand especially with regard to moral and religious ideas the ancient Greeks led in their investigations if they looked at what people were doing around the world they thought well maybe many of our moral and religious beliefs are just local conventions and so one pre-socratic thinker said well the Ethiopians have gods that look Ethiopian and the Greeks of gods that look Greek how do we know what the gods really look like so that kind of investigation of customs and practices around the world also was a source of skepticism and it went into how people dress thee in different civilized interesting incursions wear long gowns and things we don't do that exactly all those sorts of observations when I say the origins of skeptical thought okay would it be true to say this is really massive generalization so please knock it down but up to about the fifth century BC or so we thought had come out of or been associated strongly with religion with the dogmas of religion where the revelations as some thought were with religion and this moved away from it this is a bit one of the first big moves away from it well I think certainly the I think that's right I think this the Socratic view and the platonic view was in a way not so much challenging religion but reconstructing it on a rational basis so casting doubt on some of the assertions so for example on the existence of all the multiple Olympic gods and saying actually God in its nature must be single must be good so skeptical arguments used in a way to to rationalize religion not necessarily to disprove it did skepticism lead to a release of thought yes I think so it's very strongly associated with freedom of thought in in later thinkers especially as well as we'll talk about in Cicero describes it as a form of freedom of thought even Hegel says that's the sceptical moment is the moment of free thinking and you referred to Socrates and Plato as Academy and it went through the Greek tradition now there were two types of skepticism as I understand it the academic and the pureness schools can you tell us the can you distinguish between the two schools please both schools trace their origins to the 3rd century BC so about 80 years after the death of Plato and in a nutshell the differences that the academics are still there within Plato's Academy that they're called academics that's a movement that that develops within the Academy and they still hold to that Socratic view that the wise man is the person who knows the limits of knowledge and in particular the academics were in debate with the Stoics who also had actually started within the Academy and then split off from it and who said that to have knowledge you have to have a criterion of certainty and there are certain cognitive impressions that are self-certifying and the academics challenged that and said there's no such thing as a self-certifying impression so we can't have certain knowledge and the other school were the pureness school and they although they trace their origins to a couple of figures in the 3rd century BC they only really take shape about a hundred years either side of Christ and they were more radical because they they held not that wisdom was still the path to tranquillity but wisdom was knowing the limits of our knowledge that was the Socratic academic view but instead the pureness held that actually we could be happy and tranquil without having wisdom at all that we could suspend what we should do in fact is try to suspend belief about any kind of dogmatic claim or appearance so snow appears white but is it really white we suspend judgment about that and the gods appear Greek but are they really Greek we have to suspend judgment about that and that it's that suspension of judgment which will actually bring us tranquility you use the word certain knowledge and that played a part and has played a part in as I understand it and the development of skepticism ever since have you any way of telling mister is what is meant at that time in the 3rd century BC by human knowledge by certain so that that does derive from this particularly from the stoic approach from the stoic claim that there has to be a criterion so that anything that appears to me I can't just go on appearance I have to have a criterion to determine is that appearance really valid is it actually the way that things are in reality and some of the disciples particularly of the Parana suggested well actually well both the academics and the pianist suggested we just can't have such a criterion and any appearance that might seem to be certain is actually indistinguishable from another appearance that wouldn't have that certain origin and so we just don't have that criterion let's continue the talk about the Pyrenees school named after this person called Pierrot would you tell us a bit more about him and more specifically what he believed he's from the 3rd century and we don't really know much about him he didn't write anything and all we have are a bunch of legends and rumors which grew up about him and were reported and they didn't really actually in the form that we know them they were written down in the 3rd century AD so that's about six centuries after he lives so it's very hard to sift out what he actually believed from from what the legends that develop but he had the view that nothing was either in itself good or bad honorable or dishonorable that nothing was either more this than that and he apparently according to some stories he took this to such an extreme that he would not pay any attention to what was going on around him so if he was walking across the street and there was a carriage he wouldn't get out of the way if he was walking by a cliff and he in order to prevent himself he would have to turn he wouldn't do that so his friends would follow him around and keep him out of harm's way and then Diogenes says but he lived to 90 so they must have done a good job and we have another story at one of these very helpful friends who was saving his life fell in a ditch and Pierrot just walked by and paid no attention to him and some people criticized him but the friend said no that shows that he's not paying more attention that to to his emotions that he doesn't think anything is more this than that we have stories that he he had this completely even demeanor so when he was talking and somebody went away he would just continue talking because that's what he was doing we have stories that he went against the conventions of the day there are a lot of them involving pigs he would wash pigs he would take them to market he was on a boat once when there was a storm and everyone was getting upset and he said no be calm look at that pig over there and that's sitting there eating that pig has the tranquility and he uses the technical term that the Greek that the skeptics use for that that the wise man should follow but we also have evidence in the life of Pierrot that I said from the 3rd century diogenes laërtius that the people in the paradise revival that Melissa mentioned from the 1st century BC said no he didn't actually try and live his philosophy he only suspended judgment in thought and in his own life he actually behaved like everyone else so you paid your money and you takes your chances I mean the the their their the the stories are just contradictory and and we have to still sort them out and people in the Renaissance we're trying to sort them out and in the 19th century one of the people who tried to sort them out was Nietzsche who his first two articles were actually on the sources of diogenes laërtius well that's vivid enough I mean so we've got we've nailed him I think can you tell us what he stood for that was important enough for people to follow it and for it to enter into the mainstream mainstream of the philosophical discussion of skepticism I think it's this idea the central idea is that nothing is either this nor that more this than that in other words a sense of complete rules yeah complete indifference and therefore this indifference will lead you to the suspension of judgment the suspension of judgment will then lead you to this peace of mind and there's a nice story which actually comes from another source of the painter of Pelley's who was trying to paint the foam the horse had a little bit of saliva on its mouth and he was trying to paint that and he couldn't do it he couldn't do it and finally he just took the sponge that he was cleaning his brushes with and threw it at the painting and it produced the effect but he wanted he threw in the sponge and he got the effect and that's what suspension of judgment is throwing in the sponge the effect is you get this tranquility and peace of mind which people in the Hellenistic era seemed to be very interested in achieving it's it's a very odd thing one of these students says Plato's Academy long time after Plato's death was the Roman statesman and writer Cicero how did skepticism influence his work you can't think of anybody further away from the pillow can you but that's how did it affect his work well he studied in Athens with the academic sceptics and he was a member of that sect and he is a very important source for us because almost all the flaws all the philosophers that he writes about we have no works by them so he is the person who transmitted them and his idea was that he wanted to transplant Greek philosophy to Rome and the thing about the Romans as we all know there are very practical people they fought wars they conquered people they build aqueducts and roads they weren't very interested in philosophy that was something for the Greeks who were intellectual but ineffectual and they'd been conquered by the Romans so he wanted to bring philosophy to to Rome and to do that you had to write in Latin you had to explain these ideas and this is what he did particularly he we know about he wrote about the Epicureans whom he didn't like and the Stoics he was sympathetic to but with the sceptics there there his group he's a card-carrying member and we get an inside count beauty Millican there's an important surviving work of ancient skepticism by a philosopher called Sixtus empiric us he's anti skepticism but in the process of being ante as I understand he says all about it no I don't think of him as being as well in somebody's notes they were very cool yet sex this is extremely important because I mean a couple of the works that survived have already been mentioned we've got Cicero's works in particular were called académica and we've got diogenes laërtius who wrote lives of the eminent philosophers which really has lots of snippets but sex does empirica swooz the third and possibly the most important in terms of future influence of the works that actually survived to tell us about ancient skepticism so he he flourished around the end of the second century AD he was a physician possibly in Alexandria we're not sure but he collected together all sorts of teachings of the the Pyrenees school so he wrote a work called outlines of perónism which was particularly famous and various other works as well with arguments against all sorts of people logicians physicists ethicists and various dogmatists but what was so important about Sextus is that he was a systematic collector of these he codified a lot of the ways of arguing the reasons for doubt and his manuscripts survived pretty much intact until the early modern period and had a huge effect then so he emphasised things like the problem of the criterion that we've that's already been mentioned by Melissa the idea that you want a criterion of truth how do you how do you know what's true and the problem of the criterion is that in order to recognize the criterion of truth it seems that you need a criterion for choosing your criterion so you get a kind of circular problem or it regressives yeah exactly yes and so he also he just goes straight because I think I'm slightly going man you be so he actually accepted the skepticism the philosophers put it forward I must be cross I don't I read that bit okay fine and as we've heard the idea of the fairness skepticism was to suspend judgment so what he did was codify a whole load of ways of arguing so that on more or less any question you could see reasons for arguing either side and the idea of this was to bring you to a position of suspension where you're neither affirming nor denying anything incidentally the purr nests typically said of the academic sceptics that they were dogmatists for denying that you could have knowledge say you shouldn't even assert that we can't have knowledge yes Melissa Lane skepticism touched on religion in the Middle Ages let's begin into way deep in the Middle Ages almost before it Augustine of Hippo was a skeptic and then a pleasantest and then a Christian did he set the course for the discussion between these two systems Augustine engages very directly with Cicero whom Joe was talking about earlier and it is as you say a phase in his philosophical and religious evolution so actually it comes after his manichaean phase he starts to think of the Manicheans as dogmatists and so in the early 380 in terms of good and evil and exactly these are two forces sort of battling it out and in the early 380s reading these skeptics Agustin entertains the thought well maybe they're wiser to suggest that we should doubt everything and we can't actually have any certain knowledge and so he's following Cicero and Cicero is his source but then when he goes into his plaintiffs and Christian phase he then writes a work a contra a khadeem eCos so against Cicero's skeptical work and it's very interesting he brings a number of different arguments against it so on the one hand he's been thought to anticipate Descartes by saying there are some necessary truths and Agustin says I err therefore I am so I make mistakes but even in in making mistakes I must exist to make the mistakes he also says well against the skeptics there are some subjective truths so he says I know that this feels cold to me so the skeptics would've said well it feels cold but you don't know whether it's really cold or not and Agustin says that may be so but I know that it feels cold so that's something I know so that was an interesting move but I think one of the most interesting moves about Agustin with Agustin that's unusual actually is that he also thinks skepticism is morally and religiously dangerous so he says what if you have a young man who becomes a skeptic and then lays siege to the chastity of another man's wife that skepticism could lead to a kind of immorality and that's an unusual charge because actually most of the concern about skepticism was that it would lead to paralysis of the kind that Jill was describing with Pierrot that the skeptic just wouldn't be able to act or as Agustin actually sees it as a danger to religion and one that needs to be overcome the moving on a bit quick to here but gia but just to take another and bited it from a different period of history skepticism was rediscovered in the Renaissance partly through Cicero's works and partly through the spread of these works in Latin and the invention of the printing press which distributed knowledge much more widely and so on can you tell us how it was discovered what impact it had well academic was read not very much in the Middle Ages but we find evidence in the 14th and 15th century of more people reading it more copies being made but it's not really till the 16th century that it takes off and people start writing commentaries and treatises we get with the Greek sceptical works diogenes laërtius which was not this bit of it was not known in the Middle Ages it's translated into Latin in 1433 in Florence and interestingly that is where we get the word skeptic because the translator instead of translating the Greek because as an Enquirer an investigator just chooses to transliterate it and then from that latin word it gets into the vernacular languages that work was very popular it was circulated in manuscript it was printed frequently and we don't it's a very large work so we don't know that people were particularly interested in life of Pierrot but it was available to them sexist empirica also we start seeing manuscripts circulating in the 15th century it remained in in manuscript in Greek until late in the sixteenth century so only a very few people could read it because Greek was a very unusual skill particularly in the 15th century but we have a handful of people who we know Reddit and excerpted it usually leaving out the philosophical bits and just taking the arguments that sexist was imposing opposing it gets into Latin in the 1560s the outlines is translated by a Protestant and against the professors is translated by a Catholic they're published and they're put together with the life of Pierrot from diogenes laërtius laërtius and a very interesting little work by Galen which is called the best method of teaching which is a small little work where he attacks skepticism but rather like Agustin be in attacking it he provides information and that work was translated by Erasmus what were these views that sexist was opposing he was opposing everything as Peter said he wrote against the logicians against the ethicist he wrote against the physicians he wrote against grammarians astrologers geometers musicians everything what he wanted to show always was that for every argument there is a counter-argument of equal force that was the kind of central idea and the various arguments are all to show you that and if you then see that for every dogmatic argument there's an equally powerful and valid counter-argument you will suspend judgment because you can't make a decision Peter Milligan so why do you think skeptical thought had such an appeal to humanist scholars Erasmus has been mentioned yeah well I think the reason it had such impact at the time it's important to see the context as you mentioned you've got the invention of printing which is spreading these things around much more than they've ever been spread before you've got the translation into Latin which may is making them much more available but also it's coming into a world which is full of doubt perhaps most important Luther and the Reformation starting around 1517 population is growing there's a lot of trade with new places and the new world is being discovered and suddenly people are aware that the the Bible and Aristotle which have been pretty much the Oracle's up till now actually don't say anything about this new world there's cultural relativity new lands being found people with strange beliefs all these things naturally raise the question how confident can we be in our own beliefs given that there are all these people some of them our neighbors with different religious views some of them far away with all sorts of exotic beliefs how confident can we be in our own beliefs and so it was from that starting point really and that the fact that the America wasn't in the Old Testament all that sort of thing I mean I think another another thing is that the worth with Galileo and his discoveries I mean the the Aristotelian worldview was being overthrown there was a new science being developed by people like him and Descartes and they saw skepticism also as a useful tool so Descartes uses it in order to clear away the Aristotelian orthodoxy joke right can we move to the French writer Michel de Montaigne who took up skepticism with a great deal of enthusiasm can you tell us about that he got access to sexless Americas from the Latin translation that I was speaking of in 1562 and it really had a fantastic impact on him we know in his library which he retreated to to write his essays he carved little mottos on the beams and many of them come directly from from sexist Americas I suspend judgment I examine I don't lean this way more than that way and in one of his most famous essays which deals with skepticism he said he talks about his own personal device his logo and that is a pair of scales which are evenly balanced and this is the argument for every proposition there is a counter proposition and under it he says he has the motto in French French who says what do I know and this is probably the most famous of his quotations and we do actually have a medal of Montaigne which survives and it does have the scales but instead of the French motto it has the Greek for I suspend judgment so it was really quite important to him and I think the fact that he was living through very brutal Wars of Religion in France which he tried to stay out of I mean he was a Catholic but he tried to be very tolerant but he saw around him people killing each other killing their neighbors over things that they believed and he really thought that this was a result of dogmatism he says dogmatism does not allow us not to know what we do not know in other words it polarizes things it forces us to change to take sides and therefore skepticism can diffuse this this seems to be this battle Minister this alone which is going through and now growing between schools scepticism we're saying we don't know anything or we know little oh we're uncertain of most things and the search for certainty which comes back again emphatically with Descartes moving the story forward can you discuss Descartes yes so exactly that that contrast between skepticism itself being the solution as it were the therapy the way of life that will bring us tranquility which is what it was for the ancient skeptics and for Montaigne but in Descartes it becomes a tool in the search for certainty so skepticism becomes a moment to be overcome rather than actually the path to tranquillity and one mark of this I think is that I'm whereas in Cicero and Agustin we get dialogues there works about skepticism are in dialogical form in descartes we have a kind of monologue we have a single mind inquiring within his own head rather than opposing argument some from the outside one to the other and so Descartes really introduces this thought of Surtsey cheat searching for the foundations of knowledge and he very explicitly uses this architectural metaphor from the rediscovery of the Truvia that what we're trying to do is to build solid foundations if you're an architect you don't want to build on sand and so you have to question all your beliefs subject them all to a radical doubt so that you can reconstruct some foundational beliefs that can then serve as the basis for our science and philosophy rather like maintain his foundational belief came up with a phrase that's still with us isn't it yes I'm so actually his earliest formulation was in French I'm Japan's doctor just sweet so I think therefore I am but of course we now think of it from a later version that he used in Latin the cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am was that received with any profession or did approval or did people question that it was very controversial I mean it set the agenda for science for some decades to come and it was challenged on the one hand by some religious Christians a bishop a tax Descartes saying actually he's undermining the foundations of faith Descartes himself had thought that he was firming up the foundations of faith because at the bottom of his foundations foreknowledge was actually the existence of God but but but not everyone accepted that that was the way you should go thinking about God Peter Milligan what was the next stage forward are we talking about the influence that appear bear one hand on it I'm just taking you through after day car yeah well Descartes had a big anti skeptical influence and he he had a lot of followers because he he seemed to be pointing the way towards a new way of thinking about the world a new physics as well as a new metaphysics and so he was extremely influential but skeptical the the sceptical theme did get carried forward probably mostly by Pierre Bayle Pierre Bayle like Montaigne was influenced a lot by the Wars of Religion in France and for similar sorts of reasons though from the other side he was a Hyuga know a French Protestant he was very keen to emphasize the importance of toleration so he saw skepticism in the form of our again with as Melissa was saying the word Descartes got that has got this monologue the skeptics often tend to put things in terms of dialogue so Bale writes this historical in critical dictionary in in which he puts lots of views from all over the place lots of contrasting discussions most of it's actually in footnotes with all sorts of imagined conversations giving different sides of different stories and all of them with the intention of promoting tolerance and the realization that there's lots to be said on all different sides so religious belief and capitalism are intertwined and opposed underpinning each other and undermining each other right throughout the 17th century in many cases from then on and can you give us a specific example and help us on this it's interesting because in a way it goes back actually to antiquity that on the one hand there were people who were using skeptical arguments to shore up Christianity saying well if we can disprove all the dogmatic claims of reason that leaves room for faith and then on the other hand you have people saying skepticism is a kind of danger to religion because it undermines our certainty and our own beliefs and so that goes right through into the early modern period and one interesting example is from the early 16th century the nephew of the famous some Pico della Mirandola and this is the nephew Gian Francesco and he uses he's our only actually known reader of Sextus in greek before it was translated into latin and he uses skeptical arguments to attack all the vain doctrines of the nation's or of the Gentiles then and and leave room for a Christian faith so that's a kind of interesting example of skepticism being used to defend Christianity even though others thought that it was a danger to it he was in fact a follower of Savonarola and Savonarola's famous of course for the bonfire of the vanities and the treatise that John Francesco wrote is called the vanity of pagan learning so it's another thing to put on the van on the bon bon fire that we must get rid of pagan learning because if we demolish it then people will turn to the authority of the Bible and the Catholic Church and the papacy and that is a position that Montaigne takes as well he says that after the reason why the parents are so valuable is they show man naked without any power we he loses faith in his reason and that allows him or encourages him to take his inspiration from on high and he refers he says after skepticism man is like a blank tablet on which the finger of God can carve whatever word he wants Peter Mallick continued take us to the Scottish enlightenment particularly David Hume who played as a big part to play here so let's concentrate a bit on David Hume what did he bring to the table well David Hume actually was influenced quite a lot by Bale and just following up something that Jill said there in both Bale and Hume we have this issue that skeptical arguments are presented and then we get the art the upper the thought that the skepticism makes room for faith and it can be quite difficult to work out what the real view of the the writer is I mean my suspicion is that Bale really was a believer he really was what we call a phidias that's someone who believes on the basis of faith with the skepticism having undermined mere human reason in the way that st. Paul or Calvin would have approved of where as David Hume I think is in fact pretty much what we would call an atheist and for him I think when he says skepticism has made room for faith I think he's being disingenuous for very good reasons but Hume was born in 1711 he he wrote one of the greatest works of philosophy absolutely full of skepticism the treatise of human nature in 1739 and 1740 his later work is much more mitigated he moved towards what he called academic skepticism it's not quite clear that his understanding of it was exactly the same as that of the ancients but generally a mitigated skepticism in which skeptical arguments make us aware of how little justification we've got the dogmatism and going towards a very reasonable kind of spirit of inquiry again going back really to the original thought of skeptics so in fact humans ultimate view is not very different from that of a modern scientist he does rather graphically say I struggled with this particular problem of induction if you can bring that to ten simulations and then I went out one night or and then I came back and looked at it and said what am i bothering with this for you can say rather better than me yes well he actually says this most famously with regard to the problem of the external world where he grapples with this in the treatise in book 1 and comes to the conclusion that our belief in the external world is completely incoherent not only can you not give any good arguments for it when you actually examine the belief you find it really doesn't make sense to think of an object persisting through time so there aren't any continuing objects distinct from us but then and at the end of that he just says well the only solution to this is carelessness and inattention I won't pay any attention to the skeptical arguments and in a very famous passage he says I dine I play a game of backgammon you know I converse with my friends and all of these skeptical worries just disappear and I go back and look at what I've written explained you must be so good but but as I say the Humes ultimate view seems to be quite different from that it's much more calm and relaxed the sort of extreme skepticism that you get in the treatise where these these fundamental beliefs are are are portrayed as completely incoherent that disappears and what we get instead is an appreciation of what Hume calls the whimsical condition of mankind we have faculties which tell us about the world we can reasonably expect say that stones will fall when we drop them or billiard balls will move when other balls bash into them but famously although we don't know what what happened in the future if we use the working model that they've been much the same has happened today or in the past then it'll be okay that's the reasonable thing to do but we're just in this whimsical condition that we can't justify our own faculties of course we use them but we can't ultimately justify them so the dogmatic philosopher who wants to take everything down to certain principles it is simply going after the impossible did skepticism Jill cried you've kept says I'm have a profound effect on the on the scientific enlightenment yes in the seventeenth century you have the one line of inquiry which is Descartes who says you really can't do science you can't go on and make progress in science and that's we have absolute metaphysical certainty unless we know that our we have absolutely infallible information which comes from the cogito and then there's another school of thought you get some French priests magnificent and Pierre Gassendi who say no we can't get that kind of certainty only God has that certainty but it doesn't really matter because we can get a second level of certainty which only deals with appearances we're not making any claims about reality but that is actually sufficient to be getting on with scientific progress there's an interesting political dimension to that as well so if we think of Thomas Hobbes who's part of that Scientific Revolution in the mid 17th century he starts his political philosophy not from something we know but from something he thinks people can't reasonably deny which is the claim that I have the right to try to preserve myself and so you see the mark of skepticism there we have to build up science again and build up political science but not on the basis of a knowledge claim but outside that they develop this theory is limited certitude which means that we know less than the dogmatist think but rather more than the skeptic the skeptics thinks so we we can know we can have a fairly certain knowledge about mass and about physical events we can have knowledge that will allow us to get through our lives by applying the principle of reasonable doubt we shouldn't doubt everything that's possible we should only doubt it when we have a good reason and and I think you can draw a distinction between kinds of doubt we tend to think of doubt as opposite to belief but actually it needn't be doubt can be just the spirit of inquiry about one's beliefs what the grounds are for them so it's perfectly possible and Hume is the most famous example here to carry on believing things and yet at the same time have an attitude of skepticism towards those beliefs an attitude of constant inquiry wondering what the basis for them is appreciation that the basis isn't as firm as some people might like but it's enough for life and we don't have to always be looking for certainty probability is most of the time good enough particularly in science the the group around the Royal Society took this more or less as their principle that they would find the best hypothesis they could that would explain it appearances and that would allow them to make scientific progress and even a great scientist like Robert Boyle wrote a work called the skeptical chemist so we we we can get four we can go forward with science on the basis of this limited certitude and we can get on with our lives finally miss lane how influential is skepticism today do you think it's a basic problem of histology so whenever you take a piss Tamala G 101 you're taught well how can we refute the skeptic that that still remains one of the fundamental questions in philosophy although some people have tried to get away from the foundational as well we know how can we know what we know exactly some people have tried to get away from that foundationalist paradigm and come up with another way forward I'm good a certain speed and we've heard how actually the spirit of modern science is absolutely infused with skepticism well thank you very much - you're crazy - alone Peter Milliken next week Hadrian's Wall think of a listening if you've enjoyed this BBC podcast why not try others such as the forum the discussion programme about global ideas to find out more visit BBC World Service calm / forum

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 15,226

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Keywords: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, David Hume, Certainty, Descartes, Epistemology, Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhonism, External World, Induction, Fallibilism, Theory of Knowledge, Problem of the Criterion, Skepticism, Foundationalism, Philosophical Skepticism, Dogmatism, Pyrrho, Relativism, Problem of Induction, Epoché, Agnosticism, Western Philosophy, Truth, Academic skepticism, Doubt, Ancient Skepticism, Greek Philosophy, Carneades, Scepticism

Id: HLAcSS39otg

Length: 41min 54sec (2514 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2017