Scepticism

By Cohen, Stewart

Simply put, scepticism is the view that we fail to know anything. More generally, the term ‘scepticism’ refers to a family of views, each of which denies that ...

Scepticism

By Schönbaumsfeld, Genia

Radical scepticism is the contention that little or no knowledge of one’s ‘external’ surroundings might be possible. Most modern forms of scepticism have their roots in René Descartes’ ...

Scepticism, moral

see Moral scepticism.

Moral scepticism

By Nelson, Mark T.

Scepticism in general is the view that we can have little or no knowledge; thus moral scepticism is the view that we can have little or no moral ...

External world scepticism

see Scepticism.

Sceptical theism

By McBrayer, Justin

Sceptical theists are theists who are sceptical of our abilities to discern whether the evils in our world constitute good evidence against the existence of God. According to ...

Scepticism, Renaissance

By Popkin, Richard H.

Ancient Greek scepticism was revived during the Renaissance, and played an important role in the religious and philosophical controversies of the time. There is little evidence that ancient ...

Renaissance philosophy

By Ashworth, E.J.

The term ‘Renaissance’ means rebirth, and was originally used to designate a rebirth of the arts and literature that began in mid-fourteenth century Italy (see Humanism, Renaissance). Here ...

Epistemology

Epistemology has been traditionally concerned with questions about the nature, value, and scope of knowledge, together with other questions that arise in relation to these. Hence, another name ...

Ancient philosophy

By Sedley, David

The philosophy of the Greco-Roman world from the sixth century bc to the sixth century ad laid the foundations for all subsequent Western philosophy. Its greatest ...

Perception

By Logue, Heather

If you want to get to grips with philosophy of perception, the best place to start is M.G.F. Martin’s entry on (you guessed it) perception! ...

Pyrrhonism

By Hankinson, R.J.

Pyrrhonism was the name given by the Greeks to one particular brand of scepticism, that identified (albeit tenuously) with Pyrrho of Elis, who was said (by his disciple ...

Strawson, Peter Frederick (1919–2006)

By Snowdon, Paul F.

Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1947, becoming Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1968, and retiring in 1987. A sequence of influential books and articles ...

Contextualism, epistemic, recent work on

By Sosa, Ernest

What you know at a given time depends of course on features of your context. You can’t know you see a fire, for example, unless there is a ...

Metacognition

By Proust, Joëlle

It has often been claimed that metacognition should be defined as “cognition about one’s own cognition,” “knowledge about one’s own knowledge,” or “thinking about one’s own thinking” (Carruthers ...

Kripke, Saul Aaron (1940–)

Saul Kripke is one of the most influential philosophers to have written on logic, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind in the twentieth century. ...

Doubt

By Williams, Michael

Doubt is often defined as a state of indecision or hesitancy with respect to accepting or rejecting a given proposition. Thus, doubt is opposed to belief. But doubt ...

Epistemic contrastivism

By Baumann, Peter

Contrastivism about knowledge is the view that one does not just know some proposition. It is more adequate to say that one knows something rather than something else: ...

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–92)

By Popkin, Richard H.

Montaigne was a sixteenth-century French philosopher and essayist, who became known as the French Socrates. During the religious wars between the Catholics and the Protestants in France, he ...

Deductive closure principle

By Brueckner, Anthony

It seems that one can expand one’s body of knowledge by making deductive inferences from propositions one knows. The ‘deductive closure principle’ captures this idea: if S knows ...

Arcesilaus (c.316–c.240 BC)

By Barnes, Jonathan

Arcesilaus of Pitane came to Athens as a young man, and was seduced by Platonic philosophy. Around 265 he became head of the Academy. He turned the school ...

Disjunctivism

By Fish, William

The disjunctivist claims that the mental states involved in a case of successful – “veridical” – perception of an object differ from those involved in a hallucinatory experience ...

Epistemology

By Klein, Peter D.

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge (see Knowledge, concept of). There is a vast ...

Knowledge, concept of

By Hannon, Michael

The word ‘know’ is exceptional for a number of reasons. It is one of the ten most commonly used verbs in English, alongside basic verbs like ‘be’, ‘do’, ...

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82)

The American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson developed a philosophy of flux or transitions in which the active human self plays a central role. At the core ...