Online research in philosophy

Confucian scholars express skepticism about rights. This skepticism is relevant to managers who face issues about the recognition of workplace rights in a Confucian culture. My essay examines the foundations of this skepticism, and the cogency of potential leading Western liberal responses to it. I conclude that Confucian skepticism is more formidable than liberals have recognized. I attempt to craft an argument that defuses Confucian skepticism about workplace rights while at the same time respecting the moral depth of Confucianism.

* INTRODUCTION This book seeks to add dimension to our understanding of Greek Skepticism by concentrating attention on a particular area that is of ...

Skepticism and its Legacy (first 1 1/2 weeks) i) Skepticism about the external world: Skepticism in some form or another is a philosophical perennial, but even so it is not unreasonable to suggest that with Descartes, skepticism of an entirely new form made its first appearance on stage. Descartes deployed a radical doubt about the external world, with methodical ambitions, and in doing so he might be taken to have raised the stakes for epistemology. What if the Cartesian response to Skepticism fails? Is our ordinary knowledge of the world impeached if we cannot refute the hypothesis that we are dreaming, or that we are the playthings of a malign demon? There is also a historical question: is Cartesian skepticism interestingly different from the Pyrrhonian and academic skepticism that was "in play" long before Descartes?

Content skepticism about practical reason is doubt about the bearing of rational considerations on the activities of deliberation and choice. Motivational skepticism is doubt about the scope of reason as a motive. Some people think that motivational considerations alone provide grounds for skepticism about the project of founding ethics on practical reason. I will argue, against this view, that motivational skepticism must always be based on content skepticism. I will not address the question of whether or not content skepticism is justified. I want only to establish the fact that motivational skepticism has no independent force.

In this paper I aim to do two things. First, I attempt to illustrate an interesting pattern of argument one can find in Hume's work. Next, I employ this Humean pattern of argument to show that IF there is a cogent and intuitive argument for any form of epistemological skepticism, which despite its cogency and intuitiveness has a (literally) unbelievable conclusion, THEN we lack a very important form of doxastic self-control, which I call rational self-control (RSC), over the beliefs problematized by that skeptical argument. Thus, (1) the challenge posed by skepticism is even deeper and more radical than commonly supposed: If any form of skepticism proves unanswerable and yet unbelievable, then we demonstrably lack RSC in the domain problematized by that form of skepticism. Thus, (2) one's views on skepticism may entail definite views on (at least one form of) doxastic self-control.

For a putative knower S and a proposition P , two types of skepticism can be distinguished, depending on the conclusions they draw: outer skepticism , which concludes that S does not know that P , and inner skepticism , which concludes that S does not know whether P . This paper begins by showing that outer skepticism has undesirable consequences because that S does not know that P presupposes P , and inner skepticism does not have this undesirable consequence since that S does not know whether P does not presuppose P . We indicate that the two types of skepticism aim to different loci of doubts: while outer skepticism doubts whether we can gain an epistemic warrant for the actuality, inner skepticism doubts whether we can gain epistemic identification of the actuality. It is further indicated that responses to skepticism from externalist theories, as well as from fallibilist internalist theories, can only respond to outer skepticism but not to inner skepticism.

What is skepticism? -- Skepticism as selective doubt -- Scientific method and rational skepticism -- Skepticism and the new enlightenment -- The growth of antiscience -- Skepticism, science, and the paranormal -- Should skeptical inquiry be applied to religion? -- Skepticism and religion -- Are science and religion compatible? -- Skepticism and political inquiry -- Skepticism and ethical inquiry -- Moral faith and ethical skepticism reconsidered -- Skepticism and eupraxsophy -- The new skepticism: a worldwide movement -- Skeptical inquiry: my personal involvement -- Science and the public: summing up thirty years of the skeptical inquirer -- The new skepticism: a statement of principles.

‘Skepticism’ refers primarily to two positions. Knowledge skepticism says there is no such thing as knowledge, and justification skepticism denies the existence of justified belief. How closely the two views are related depends on the relationship between knowledge and justification: if knowledge entails justified belief, as many theorists say, then justification skepticism entails knowledge skepticism (but not vice versa). Either form of skepticism can be limited in scope. Global (or radical) skepticism challenges the epistemic credentials of all beliefs, saying that no one knows anything, or no belief is justified. More local skepticism is restricted to some domain; thus some skeptics question the epistemic credentials of beliefs about other minds (but not beliefs about one’s own mind), or beliefs concerning empirical matters (but not concerning a priori matters).

Local versions of the (special) principle of relativity say that if the same type of experiment is conducted in two isolated, unaccelerated laboratories, then the outcomes of those experiments must be the same. Global versions of the principle say that if you take a physically possible world and boost the entire material content of that world, you get another physically possible world. Some authors say that the local and the global principles are logically independent, and that the local version is more important. These authors are wrong. I argue that the global version entails the local version, and discuss why a counterexample to this entailment offered by Tim Budden fails.

Julia Annas has affirmed that the kind of modern moral skepticism which denies the existence of objective moral values rests upon a contrast between morality and some other system of beliefs about the world which is not called into doubt. Richard Bett, on the other hand, has argued that the existence of such a contrast is not a necessary condition for espousing that kind of moral skepticism. My purpose in this paper is to show that Bett fails to make a good case against Annas’ thesis. To accomplish this, it will be helpful to consider the Pyrrhonean attitude towards morality as expounded in Sextus Empiricus’ work.