Issue 7.4 of IJSS

Issue 7.4 of the International Journal for the Study of Skepticism is now out. It is devoted to a symposium on Annalisa Coliva's Extended Rationality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). It can been accessed here.

Second Yearbook of the MCAS

The second Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies has just been published. All the papers can be accessed for free here.

Skepticism and Religion Workshop

On November 7-8, the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies (Hamburg) will host the workshop “Scepticism and Religion in al-Ghazālī, Maimonides, and Hume.” Detailed information can be found here.

Oswaldo Porchat (1933-2017)

On October 15th, Oswaldo Porchat Pereira passed away. This is very sad news particularly for the Brazilian philosophical community. Porchat pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in philosophy at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), obtaining a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Aristotle’s conception of science. He spent research periods in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. He was the founder of both the philosophy department and the Centro de Lógica, Epistemologia e História da Ciência at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). He considered himself a skeptic and devoted his work almost exclusively to discussing Sextus Empiricus's Pyrrhonism. His teaching and writings exerted a strong influence on his students (e.g., Plínio Junqueira Smith, Luiz Eva, Otávio Bueno, Roberto Bolzani), to the extent that several of them devoted their own work to the study of skepticism, creating in Brazil a relatively large community of academics interested in that philosophical movement. At the time of his death, he was emeritus professor at USP. I met him once in 2014, in São Paulo, when I gave a talk about his neo-Pyrrhonism, which is expounded in a series of papers collected in Rumo ao Ceticismo (Editora UNESP, 2007). It is quite hard to determine exactly what his skeptical stance consists in, but as he told me then, he always took his latest paper to be the true expression of his thought and was largely unconcerned with whether it was consistent with the ideas expounded in his previous writings. He seemed to be a gentle person.

Lecture on Jewish Skepticism

Giuseppe Veltri (Hamburg) will give the lecture “Negotiating the Principle of (Non)-Contradiction: Johann Frischmuth (1619-1687) on the Rabbinic Sceptic Dialectic” both at Johns Hopkins University (October 24th) and at Princeton University (October 25th). For more information, click here and here, respectively.

Lecture on Ancient Skepticism

On October 16th, Giuseppe Veltri (Hamburg) will give the lecture, “Ancient Skepticism: Strategies of a Philosophical Movement,” at the American University in Bulgaria. You can find more information here.

Conference on Skepticism in Early Modern Philosophy

On October 13-15, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (Canada) will host the conference “Scepticisme, rhétorique et politique à l'âge classique.” You can read the program by going here or by clicking on the images below.