What do Philosophers Do?

Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy

Penelope Maddy (, University of California, Irvine)

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English

Oxford University Press
09 March 2017

Philosophy; History of Western philosophy

Series: The Romanell Lectures

How do you know the world around you isn't just an elaborate dream, or the creation of an evil neuroscientist? If all you have to go on are various lights, sounds, smells, tastes and tickles, how can you know what the world is really like, or even whether there is a world beyond your own mind? Questions like these - familiar from science fiction and dorm room debates - 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 - that there are trees, that we have hands - than we have to disbelieve it.

Like non-philosophers 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.

By: Penelope Maddy ( University of California Irvine)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 184mm, Width: 134mm, Spine: 24mm
Weight: 312g
ISBN: 9780190618698
ISBN 10: 0190618698
Series: The Romanell Lectures
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 09 March 2017
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface Introduction Part I: The Dream Argument 1. Descartes on dreaming 2. Stroud on dreaming 3. Stroud vs. Austin Part II: The Argument from Illusion 1. The argument 2. Shortcomings of the argument 3. Why is the argument so appealing? 4. From the argument to skepticism 5. Back to dreaming Part III: The Cure and Beyond 1. Moore 2. Wittgenstein 3. Beyond Appendix A: The infinite regress of justifications Appendix B: The closure argument Bibliography Index

Penelope Maddy received her BA in Mathematics from UC Berkeley and her PhD from Princeton. Since then, she has held positions at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and since 1987 at the University of California at Irvine. Since 1998, her appointment has been in Irvine's Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, of which she was the founding chair. She is the author of Realism in Mathematics, Naturalism in Mathematics (Lakatos Award 2002), Second Philosophy, Defending the Axioms, and The Logical Must.

Reviews for What do Philosophers Do?: Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy

This is an outstanding book. It offers an extremely attractive response to standard forms of external world skepticism, and rich and illuminating readings of J.L. Austin, G.E. Moore, and Wittgenstein. The prose is clear and sparkling, the argumentation careful and compelling, and the discussion highly sophisticated without ever getting bogged down in unnecessary detail. It offers a clarion call to a certain way of approaching our subject, an approach that is both distinctive and yet deeply familiar: a return to the convictions and subtleties of real life. * Adam Leite, Indiana University, Bloomington *