No.88
There used to be a philosophical practice back in Greece, simply called skepticism. It wasn't a theory of any kind and those practicing it held no beliefs whatsoever; it was more of a skill acquired with practice. Some time later, a bunch of folks at Plato's place misinterpreted it and turned it into edgy bullsoykaf, which is called academic skepticism or epistemological nihilism today. Back in the day however, both of these were just called skepticism and thus great confusion ensued. The scarcity of written material and the workings of Catholics has further twisted whatever was left of it, and so philosophers in the last 300-400 years have attached the most misguided and irrelevant comments to it, ensuring that even contemporary academic sources are just flaming, bat-winged strawmen. How ironic, that the one practice that managed to steer clear of epistemological error has been judged to be all sorts of bullsoykaf by 'great' philosophers with cheap epistemological standards. Luckily this probably isn't something that would trouble any pyrrhonist.
No.162
>>88The problem with skepticism is that to be coherent about it you have to eventually have to turn skepticism on it's self.
In other words skepticism taken to it's logically conclusion is self refuting or else it becomes in itself a dogma.
No.166
>>162well it's evident that with absolute skepticism, reason falls apart under its own weight and makes all philosophizing impossible. It's for this reason that we may want to use skepticism as a starting point: "Nothing is provably true, but we can create a system of knowledge by making a few judicious assumptions. I know that, strictly speaking, no assumption is any better than any other, but we need something to go off of anyway."
No.168
>>88Skepticism is just a comfy position to take but nothing else. You can effortlessly refute opponents arguments by clever rhetorics but asides from that only product of it is pure passivity, which as it self acts as a force in history but to its injury. That is why highly speculative concepts like eschatology in Christianity has more reality then skepticism which ought to be intellectually superior. So it makes sense that skepticism made it to its ultimate logical conclusion - to be forgotten.
Thats I would rather be pure idealist then absolute skeptic that is indifferent to everything and as a consequence totally irrelevant.
No.313
>>312I think you're really missing the point.
No.319
>>162>>166lol can't be skeptical of tautologies and direct experience. maybe you can't prove causality.
