Thursday, December 14, 2017

Penelope Maddy on External-World Skepticism

At the beginning of the year, Penelope Maddy (UC, Irvine) published What Do Philosophers Do? Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy (OUP, 2017). There's a recent critical review in NDPR by Alexander Jackson.

4 comments:

  1. Great post, thanks (the review exemplifies what is wrong with contemporary philosophy, imho)

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  2. What do you have in mind, specifically?

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  3. Sorry, it really is a humble opinion; I don't have anything specific in mind (but just at random from the first page: "I was disappointed that Maddy didn't address potential objections to her view or discuss promising alternatives." Basically, Alex likes the mainstream approach, and so I got very little feel for what Penny was actually saying from his review; it was more like reading a referees' rejection of her book (imho) ... Thanks for alerting me to Maddy's book though, I await its arrival via my local library ...

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  4. ...btw there is a pretty good argument that we probably are BIVs: scientifically advanced aliens would tend to predominate. We can still know that our hands are real because we have direct access to our bodily state and so can know that we are not dreaming (where "dream" and "real" would both refer to BIV-states were we BIVs), but as I say, I have yet to read Maddy's book.

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