Search Results

Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals, a patron of Greek culture, founded in Alexandria, capital of his Egyptian empire, the Library, the greatest depository of Greek literature, and the Museum, a research institute. Science made great advances in the Museum. The Library produced great scholars but little new literature. The principal philosophical innovation of the period was the rise of Skepticism, which utterly rejected high beliefs, whether tethered or not. Greek Skepticism is the ancestor of modern Positivism and Pragmatism, not of Cartesian skepticism. It was quite correct for its time, but it is a good thing that it did not prevail, for it would have eliminated the element of imagination that is essential to science.

This chapter examines the origins of the iconography of Doubting Thomas around the turn of the fifth century. By taking up the famous incredulity of the apostle who was uncertain whether he was seeing a mere ghost or the actual, resurrected body of Christ in the flesh, it considers how the imagery keys into broader theological and philosophical arguments about sense-perception, materiality, and embodiment.

Chapter 1 questions why the early twentieth-century soundscape was called by its contemporaries “the age of noise,” and considers how the changing soundscape influenced listening practices. In particular, auditory technologies altered sound perception by creating new paths for intimacy, by exposing listeners to a cosmopolitan and bohemian world of new sounds, and by aestheticizing noise and sound through mechanical reproduction. Yet, why else might modernist literature emphasize sound in ways that the previous generation did not? Scholars such as Steven Connor, Jonathan Sterne, David Michael Levin, and Don Ihde hold that auditory experience has been neglected in modernity and philosophy, where sight is traditionally privileged. More importantly, some of these writers suggest that while the eye has a tendency to be distancing and analytical, the ear has the potential to connect humans to one another and their environment. Building on Martin Jay’s argument that a skepticism of vision began with turn-of-the-century thinkers, such as Henri Bergson, and modernist artists, this chapter argues that modernists include the auditory as a way of subverting visual-based notions of rationality and subjectivity rooted in antiquity and the Enlightenment.

This chapter examines Cicero’s use of oratory as a means of establishing a connection between his subject matter, philosophy, and traditional public life. The emphasis is on the connection between philosophy and rhetoric as disciplines and the continuity between Cicero the orator and statesman and Cicero the philosopher. The chapter first considers how Cicero leverages the connection between Academic Skepticism and rhetoric, in contrast to the alienating thought and style of the Stoics exemplified by the person of Cato the Younger. The discussion focuses on the preface to the Paradoxa Stoicorum, which uses the figure of Cato the Younger to work out the relationship between philosophy and active political practice. Drawing on the preface to book one of De Natura Deorum and the preface to book one of Tusculan Disputations, the chapter concludes with an assessment of the continuity between Cicero the orator and Cicero the philosopher.

The Epilogue explores what Shakespeare did with the topics of the mutability of the self; the multiplicity of truth claims and skepticism in a variety of forms; and a fascination with cultural others before he encountered Florio’s translation of Montaigne. It reminds us that Montaigne gave Shakespeare the tools both to delve into these ideas more deeply and to make them more prominent in his plays.

Religion remains exceptionally influential in America but frequently inspires indifference, skepticism or suspicion in other developed nations. Moreover, a huge minority of Americans lean towards Christian fundamentalism—a radical faith rooted in Biblical literalism and ultra-traditionalism. Due to the relative separation of church and state since the United States’ founding, Americans have not experienced the long history of religious oppression that Europeans once endured. Americans thus became far less suspicious towards organized religions, which many see as benign means of worship, not as social institutions. This is a paradox, as prominent Founding Fathers were skeptical of organized religions and Christian dogma. Jouet illustrates the weight of religion in the Bible Belt by describing his experiences as a Frenchman in Texas, where he visited evangelical churches and observed a very different kind of faith from the “soft” Catholicism he was accustomed to in France. This culture shock leads him to explore the fascinating historical and social factors behind the evolution of faith in American society.

More than anyone else, Leo Strauss inaugurated the revival of political philosophy from the dominance of positivism and behavioralism. Strauss insisted that recovering Plato and ancient philosophy could help prevent modernity’s slide into relativism and historicism. He saw the American Constitution as the closest modern approximation to the classical ideal of the mixed regime and the rule of an educated elite. In particular Strauss saw liberal education as an antidote to the rise of mass culture and mass democracy that he associated with the most dangerous tendencies of modernity. Yet Strauss was no reactionary. He thought of himself as a skeptic or a “zetetic” philosopher concerned more with raising questions than giving answers.

This chapter examines the complex legacy of Shaftesburianism and reveals the enduring vitality of natural and magical conceptions of sympathy through the first half of the eighteenth century. In so doing, it revises the standard model of treating sympathy in eighteenth-century studies, according to which sympathy “rose” after the Restoration as an exclusively moral and social principle. Both David Fordyce’s Dialogues Concerning Education and James Thomson’s Seasons reinforced Shaftesbury’s version of a sympathetic worldview, and both works demonstrate the extent to which natural and moral conceptions of sympathy remained in active conversation. With the widening impact of skepticism and empiricism among the intellectual elite, strong claims for the naturalness of sympathetic response in society functioned to secure an idea of order that was becoming more and more uncertain in the universe as a whole. As the case of Thomson shows, the aesthetic was an increasingly hospitable environment for a universal conception of sympathy that was increasingly out of place in mainstream scientific accounts of the natural world. At the same time, poets and philosophers appealed to Newtonianism as a means of bolstering a sympathetic worldview; represented as analogous to gravity, sympathy could be reuniversalized as a scientific principle.

This chapter focuses on David Hume’s critique of a sympathetic worldview, as represented by Shaftesbury and by the Peripatetic philosophers, as well as on Hume’s elevation of human sympathy as a fundamental organizing principle of society. The two worked in tandem, the chapter argues, to establish the order of things on the level of the moral and the social. For Hume, universal sympathy was not an ontological fact but a psychological fiction. The whole was unavailable to the mind except though the unscientific processes of induction and imagination. Hume affirmed and reinforced Shaftesbury’s claim for the power of sympathy in society, but he rejected the universalist aspiration of Shaftesbury’s system. In making it the cornerstone of a rigorous moral science, Hume effectively disenchanted sympathy. The chapter traces the progress of this rationalizing trend in the philosophy of Adam Smith. In spite of the development of a modern science of sympathy, however, its long-standing association with magic and mystery did not disappear. The chapter concludes with a reading of Samuel Jackson Pratt’s late eighteenth-century poem Sympathy, which reveals a longing for magical presence in the world outside the mind.

A severe and underappreciated problem confronts anyone who holds a certain popular combination of theses – namely, that there is such a thing as knowledge by revelation alone and that a defensive maneuver known as skeptical theism is sufficient to undermine a variety of popular arguments from the magnitude, intensity, duration, and distribution of evil to the nonexistence of God. After briefly characterizing and commenting on these two positions, this chapter identifies and explores the puzzle generated by their combination, and critically examines a variety of proposals for responding to that puzzle.

Radically Enactive Cognition, REC, holds that not all forms of cognition are content involving and, especially, not root forms. According to radical enactivists, only minds that have mastered special kinds of socio-cultural practice are capable of content involving forms of cognition. This paper addresses criticisms that have been leveled at REC’s vision of how content-involving cognition may have come on the scene. It responds, in the first section, to the charge that REC faces a fatal dilemma when it comes to accounting for the origins of content in naturalistic terms—a dilemma that arises from REC’s own acknowledgment of the existence of a Hard Problem of Content. In subsequent sections, the paper addresses the charge that REC entails continuity skepticism, reviewing this charge in its scientific and philosophical formulations. It is concluded that REC is not at odds with evolutionary continuity, when both REC and evolutionary continuity are properly understood. It is also concluded that although REC cannot completely close the imaginative gap that is required to answer the philosophical continuity skeptic it is, in this respect, in no worse a position than its representationalist rivals and their naturalistic proposals about the origins of content.

Employing Foucault’s 1984 reflection on the ‘critical ethos’ of modernity, the opening return statement interrogates the relationship between the Kantian concept of enlightenment and the contemporary reactions associated with post-secular and post-colonial thought.

This statement takes up John D. Caputo’s seminal work of “weak theology,” The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997). In addition to calling into question a careful reading of Derrida on the subjects of faith and reason, the author also critiques the elision of both skepticism and psychoanalysis as possible epistemologies.

The chapter confronts the epistemological problem of dream deception with evidence of scientific dream research with the aim of investigating the empirical plausibility of different scenarios of dream deception. I argue that a majority of dreams do not fulfill the conditions for counting as deceptive experiences in any interesting sense. At the same time, a number of real-world candidates for deceptive dreams exist, suggesting that dream deception is not just a theoretical possibility but an actual phenomenon. In retrospective cases of dream deception, in which dream deception extends into wakefulness, this can have detrimental consequences for the subject and may even be related to pathological disorders of sleep and dreaming. From a theoretical perspective, instances of concurrent dream deception involving cognitive corruption are particularly worrisome, because they suggest that in dreams, the phenomenology of rational thought and genuine insight is profoundly unreliable. I also discuss the analogy between dreams and delusional wake states and present a nosological analysis of lucid dreaming and insight in psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Shakespeare and Donne are themselves hybrids who crossed generic and social boundaries and also shared a contemporary urban space and roots in the old religion. Centering on cross-fertilization between these authors’ writings, the chapters in this volume examine relationships that are cultural, theoretical, and imaginative. They emphasize the intersection of physical or material dimensions of experience with nonphysical and transcendent ones, whether these are moral, intellectual, or religious. They also juxtapose lyric and sermons interactively with narrative and plays. Performance and audience are among their concerns, as are the themes of skepticism and imagination and various philosophies of thought, sensation, and meaning: Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Cavell, Kripke, Agamben, Massumi, and Serres, for example. Language and rhetoric constitute a conspicuous emphasis: naming and punning, public and private discourse, figuration. Besides these, theoretical orientations encompass intertextuality, feminism and sexuality, and historicism.