Descartes’ opening of the Pandora’s box of skepticism, and the liberation of the Evil Demon it triggered, started a terrible shock in the tectonic plates of Western thought, a shock whose waves still reach us with more or less strength, and that mainly contributed to configure our contemporary intellectual landscape. I shall devote the next […]
Together with the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation was probably the main historical factor in the (European) Modern Age. As we saw in the previous entry, the debate between different Christian denominations was a perfect breeding ground to put into use the recently rediscovered arguments of the ancient Greek Skeptics (though in practice the […]
As we saw in the previous entry of this series, skepticism had a relatively minor role during the development of medieval philosophy, with the main exception of the interesting possibility of interpreting the Pseudo-Dionysius as a skeptic about our knowledge of the nature of God (not, of course, of its being… save for ‘being’ being […]
Perhaps you ignore that the most influential philosopher of the early Middle Ages did not really exist. This Zenoan paradox is explained by the fact that the writings of this philosopher were falsely attributed to a different, and much more authoritative person, and hence, after the counterfeit was established about one thousand years later by […]
We ended the first article of this series introducing the man who very likely is the first skeptic philosopher properly speaking, Gorgias of Leontini, and who, as we saw, is said to have claimed, 1) that the being is not (or ‘there is nothing’), 2) that if some being existed, it could not be known […]
We, philosophers, tend to be more skeptical than the average person (though, if you know a little bit of the theories of some philosophers, I would understand that you take my claim with a grain of skepticism). In this series of entries, however, I will take you to a short visit to some of the […]
Psychologists and neurologists have been interested in the problem of free will since the beginning of their specialities, though the first clearly devised and relevant experiments on the topic were those of Libet and colleagues, in the early eighties. In this famous experiment, subjects who were before a clock, and whose brain electrical waves were […]
One of the most classical problems in philosophy is the existence and nature of free will. Though the growth of our scientific knowledge about the brain, and about the universe in general, is making the notion of ‘free will’ less and less tenable, it seems that the major difficulty becomes to reconcile this idea with […]
The first known application of modern economic techniques to solving epistemic problems in science was very explicit in describing the value of a scientific theory as the difference between ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’. I’m referring to Charles Sanders Peirce’s ‘Note of the Theory of the Economy of Research’, published in 1879, less than a decade after […]
That knowledge is valuable is just a truism within our ‘knowledge driven economies’, but it is not that (economic) kind of value what I will talk about in connection to knowledge. I want to introduce, instead, a current and vivid debate in an arcane corner of philosophy. It is a debate about the nature of […]