Austin and Skepticism

Last year, I missed the publication of Mark Kaplan's Austin's Way with Skepticism: An Essay on Philosophical Method (OUP, 2018). Complete information can be found here. A much shorter version of Kaplan's interpretation of Austin’s way with skepticism can be found in his chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism (OUP, 2008). 

Lecture Series on Skepticism and Tolerance

The Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at the University of Hamburg, in cooperation with the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, organizes a lecture series on “Skepsis and Toleranz: Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon Maimon und die jüdische Aufklärungsphilosophie”. For the complete program, go here.

Argumentation in Sextus Empiricus

For what it's worth, this paper of mine is now out in print: “Pyrrhonian Argumentation: Therapy, Dialectic, and Inquiry,” Apeiron 52 (2019): 199-221. Here's the abstract: 

The Pyrrhonist’s argumentative practice is characterized by at least four features. First, he makes a therapeutic use of arguments: he employs arguments that differ in their persuasiveness in order to cure his dogmatic patients of the distinct degrees of conceit and rashness that afflict them. Secondly, his arguments are for the most part dialectical: when offering an argument to oppose it to another argument advanced by a given dogmatist, he accepts in propria persona neither the truth of its premises and conclusion nor the validity of its logical form. Thirdly, he avails himself of arguments in his own open-minded inquiry into the truth about a wide range of topics. Fourthly, Pyrrhonian argumentation is oppositional inasmuch as it typically works by producing oppositions among arguments that appear to the Pyrrhonist to be equipollent. In this article, I focus on the first three features with the aim of both shedding some light on them and determining whether they are in tension or coherently relate to each other.

Skepticism and Anxiety

You might be interested in Sylvia Giocanti’s (Université de Toulouse) new book: Scepticisme et Inquiétude (Hermann, 2019). Below is the description in French, but more information can be found here. I think that, in the present context, ‘anxiety’ is probably a good translation of the French ‘inquiétude’.

Le philosophe sceptique serait-il voué à l’inquiétude? Il est admis que le sceptique antique jouit de la tranquillité de l’âme non pas en dépit du doute mais grâce à lui. Est-on fondé à soutenir que l’âme du sceptique moderne, exilée de Dieu, est tourmentée par le doute? Les Essais de Montaigne, modèle anthropologique, éthique et esthétique du scepticisme moderne, se présentent au contraire comme des pérégrinations enjouées, ou au moins consolatrices qui, se défiant de toute croyance, sont animées par un « souci de soi » non angoissé. Relayée par des scepticismes partiels (Fontenelle, Nietzsche, Cl. Rosset, M. Conche, J.-F. Billeter, H. Blumenberg), la présente étude analyse les modalités sceptiques d’une quête sereine de la jouissance du monde, ainsi que leurs points de rupture avec les conceptions métaphysique (Augustin, Heidegger), pessimiste (Pascal, Leopardi) et foucaldienne de la subjectivité.