Philosophical skepticism about the external world seeks to call into question our knowledge of the external world. Some kinds of philosophical skepticism employ skeptical hypotheses to prove that we cannot know anything about the external world. Putnam tried to refute this kind of skepticism by adopting semantic externalism; but, as is now generally accepted, Putnam’s argument is epistemically circular. Brueckner proposes some new, “simple” arguments that in his view are not circular. In this paper we evaluate Brueckner’s simple arguments for (...) refuting skepticism about the external world, and seek to demonstrate that they fail to prove that we can have knowledge about the external world. However, by appeal to the principle of privileged access, one of the Brueckner’s arguments does indeed succeed in showing that we can have justified beliefs about the external world. (shrink)

One of the most original contributions to the optimism debate of the eighteenth century was put forward by the maverick French Enlightenment thinker, André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval, in an essay entitled “General misunderstanding on the question of optimism”. This essay, which seeks to develop a “middle point” between the polarized pro- and anti-optimist positions that characterized the optimism debate, prefigures the development of process or neoclassical theism in important ways. The essay is presented here in English for the first (...) time, along with an analysis of the essay itself and of the context in which it was written. (shrink)

The question of the epistemological status of poetic language is a central concern in the Roman de la Rose. The Rose itself is in fact conceived as an extended reflection on the ability of poetry to convey philosophical and transcendent truths. While Jean de Meun invokes this possibility, his poem finally foregrounds the fictional and fabricated nature of his own poetic vision, and highlights the poet’s role as an producer of counterfeit truths. This role is explored in particular through the (...) character of Faux Semblant, who acts as an embodiment of the liar-paradox, and becomes an emblem for the elusive and paradoxical poetics of truth/deception that sustain the Roman de la Rose in its entirety. This exploration of the intrinsic deceptiveness of poetic art and the problematic role of the poet, crystallises in a series of recurrent motifs and concerns that haunt late medieval vernacular poetry more broadly, especially in France, Britain, and Italy. While the Franco-English tradition largely reproduces Jean de Meun’s own scepticism concerning the veridical status of poetic speech, the Italian tradition, especially in the Fiore and in Dante’s work, systematically seeks to suppress such scepticism, countering it with a stronger, more ambitious authorial model of the poet as vates. (shrink)

This paper intends to investigate Peter Abelard’s use of the notion of ‘exhortation’ in his theological writings. Abelard’s notion of exhortatio must be described as correlative to the notions of preaching, teaching, prophecy, edification, advice and consolation. For Peter Abelard ‘exhorting’ means ‘persuading’ somebody to act well, and this is first of all the main aim of the Scriptures: persuading then follows theaching and preceeds confirming, by way of examples, the exhortations and doctrines precedently given. According to Abelard, exhortation differs (...) from preaching on the following three points: Preaching spreads the knowledge of the law and of the precepts which is necessary to respect in order to be saved, while exhortations aim to produce a moral edification in the listeners; Preaching preceeds and founds exhortation, while exhortation follows and presuppose preaching; Only prelates, i.e. bishops and priests, are allowed to ‘preach’, while also non-prelates may produce exhortations. According to Abelard monks and philosophers specially practice exhortation: philosophers, in fact, play within the pagan society the very same role that monks plays within the Christian one. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyze how the reflection on the origins of the civilization was developed in Rome, at the end of the Republic, in a city where during centuries, nobody tried to go beyond this point of absolute origin that was the foundation of the Vrbs. In order to explore not only Cicéro’s philosophic reflection, but also his rhetorical texts, especially the De inuentione, which contains at the beginning of its first book a very interesting explanatory (...) myth both on the birth civilization, and on the evolution of human institutions. Before Cicero, the satiric poet Lucilius had tried to give a Roman adaptation of the Stoic social naturalism, by depriving it of its universalist ambition and Lucretius had an extremely deep reflection of the evolution of the selfish instinct which characterizes the human beings as all the living beings, towards forms more and more sophisticated of sociability. We evoke also a Roman peculiarity in the expression of the social oikeiôsis. All this shows the density and the variety of the Roman thought on society at the end of the Republic. (shrink)

This essay discusses how medieval authors from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries dealt with a philosophical problem that social institutions pose for the Aristotelian dichotomy between natural and artificial entities. It is argued that marriage, political community, and language provided a particular challenge for the conception that things which are designed by human beings are artefacts. Medieval philosophers based their arguments for the naturalness of social institutions on the anthropological view that human beings are political animals by nature, but this (...) strategy required rethinking the borderline between nature and art. The limits of nature were extended, as social institutions were considered to be natural even though they are in many ways similar to artificial products. (shrink)