What do Philosophers Do?: Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy
Penelope Maddy
Abstract
How do you know the world around you isn’t just an elaborate dream or the creation of an evil neuroscientist? Questions like these lie at the core of venerable philosophical arguments for radical skepticism: the stark contention that we in fact know nothing at all about the world, that we have no more reason to believe any claim than we have to disbelieve it. Like nonphilosophers in their sober moments, philosophers, too, find this skeptical conclusion preposterous, but they’re faced with those famous arguments: the Dream Argument, the Argument from Illusion, the Infinite Regress of Justificat ... More
How do you know the world around you isn’t just an elaborate dream or the creation of an evil neuroscientist? Questions like these lie at the core of venerable philosophical arguments for radical skepticism: the stark contention that we in fact know nothing at all about the world, that we have no more reason to believe any claim than we have to disbelieve it. Like nonphilosophers in their sober moments, philosophers, too, find this skeptical conclusion preposterous, but they’re faced with those famous arguments: the Dream Argument, the Argument from Illusion, the Infinite Regress of Justification, the more recent Closure Argument. If these can’t be met, they raise a serious challenge not just to philosophers, but to anyone responsible enough to expect her beliefs to square with her evidence. What Do Philosophers Do? takes up the skeptical arguments from this everyday point of view and ultimately concludes that they don’t undermine our ordinary beliefs or our ordinary ways of finding out about the world. In the process, Maddy examines and evaluates a range of philosophical methods—common sense, scientific naturalism, ordinary language, conceptual analysis, therapeutic approaches—as employed by such philosophers as Thomas Reid, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin. The result is a revealing portrait of what philosophers do, and perhaps a quiet suggestion for what they should do, for what they do best.
Keywords:
Austin,
Reid,
Moore,
Wittgenstein,
meta-philosophy,
common sense,
scientific naturalism,
ordinary language philosophy,
therapeutic philosophy,
conceptual analysis
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190618698 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190618698.001.0001 |
