PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Katja Maria Vogt is Professor of Philosophy, at Columbia University. She is the author of Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City (OUP, 2007)
This is a stimulating book on the history of philosophy which systematically defends a single message: beliefs are deficient cognitive attitudes. Jan Willem Wieland, Mind No other book on the subject focuses so ably on one issue while demonstrating the extent to which that issue has influenced subsequent history up to the present day. Highly recommended. G.S. Bagwell, CHOICE This elegantly written book makes a significant contribution to current debates about ancient epistemology, by offering a series of radical new perspectives, both historical and philosophical. It deploys a combination of skills rare among specialists in ancient philosophy. Even at their most speculative, its findings will deserve a serious hearing. David Sedley, University of Cambridge This book presents some of the best and most interesting work in the history of philosophy I have encountered in quite a few years. It should have real impact both on thinking about ancient philosophy and on thinking about the options available in contemporary discussions of knowledge and belief. Calvin Normore, UCLA This is a very exciting book... The main ideas, of belief being widely regarded as deficient and of the Stoics and skeptics in this respect standing in the shadow of Plato, are well worth taking on board. Richard Bett, Ancient Philosophy Just as Vogt [seeks] to do philosophy with Plato, her book compels us to do philosophy with her. Moreover, Vogt's challenging book has done the very hard labor of providing a Skeptic account of Plato on belief. Her work provides the much needed epistemic core for a more broadly Skeptic reading of Plato in which one sees the entire corpus as aporetic. Brian Johnson, International Philosophical Quarterly You cannot help but admire the lucidity with which the author addresses issues long debated by scholars. Mauro Bonazzi, Elenchos Vogt's interpretation of Pyrrhonian skepticism and her interpretation of Sextus' understanding of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries are nuanced and persuasive. Deborah K. W. Modrak, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews [Vogt's book] is an excellent and provocative study that offers compelling support for the notion that belief is a risky endeavour and for the sceptical inclination to opt for 'investigative attitudes that fall short of truth-claims' (p.190) ... The central intuition at work throughout is that belief is an inherently deficient doxastic state, one that we should strive to replace with the completely different state of knowledge. This is in marked contrast to a widely held contemporary view that knowledge is a species of belief ... Harald Thorsrud, Polis This is a stimulating book on the history of philosophy which systematically defends a single message: beliefs are deficient cognitive attitudes. [...] Vogt's book is to be recommended because it revives a long-standing skeptical tradition from Plato onwards and addresses important systematic questions. As Vogt comments at the beginning of her book, this tradition is not concerned with whether I have hands or with whether you are not a zombie (as other familiar skeptical problems have it), but concerns rather the importance of forming beliefs about such matters in the first place. This tradition, as Vogt emphasizes, can be seen as a battle against one's own ignorance-and this is a message worth telling. This battle does not imply, indeed, that we should make more knowledge claims. It means rather that we should know which knowledge claims we are entitled to make-namely, hardly any. Jan Willem Wieland, Mind
