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.

Benson Mates

Only a few days ago, I found out that Benson Mates had died on May 14, 2009. As most of you might know, he spent his whole career at Berkeley. Among his works on skepticism, one must mention his Skeptical Essays (University of Chicago Press, 1981); "On Refuting the Skeptic," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 58 (1984); and The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (OUP, 1996), which includes a lengthy introduction, a translation of Sextus' Outlines, and a commentary. I haven't read his Skeptical Essays, but the book is still available at the UCP's web site. Mates was among the few scholars who adopted a stance sympathetic to skepticism.

Porchat

Someone has just asked me here why I didn't include Oswaldo Porchat Pereira in the list of specialists. The reason is simply that I thought he didn't have a webpage. I’ve just found out that he does have one, so he is now on the list.

List of Specialists Updated

I've just updated the List of Specialists on the right side of the blog. I've added new names and corrected the links that were out of date. Some specialists' names are missing because they don't (seem to) have webpages.

Sextus's Against the Logicians

At last my review of Richard Bett's translation of Sextus Empiricus' Against the Logicians has been published in Bryn Mawr Classical Review. If you are interested in reading it, just click here (you will probably have to change the Greek display to read some parts). Any criticisms of my arguments are welcome.

List of Specialists Updated

I've been updating the list of specialists on skepticism, so you'll find a couple of new links to pages of important scholars. I'll been adding more in the next days.

The List

I think the list is quite complete now, particularly because it includes scholars from different countries: Brazil, Canada, England, France, Iceland, Italy, and the US. Unfortunately, there are important specialists in Pyrrhonian and Academic skepticism such as Fernanda Decleva Caizzi and Anna Maria Ioppolo who, as far as I know, don't have webpages.

List of Specialists

On the right side of this page, you'll find a list with links to the webpages of specialists in the different varieties of skepticism: Pyrrhonian or Academic; ancient, early modern or contemporary. I'm still working on the list so as to make it as complete as possible. But if you want to be added and you've got a webpage, let me know.

Michael Frede

On August 11 Michael Frede died in Delphi (Greece), where he was attending the Symposium Hellenisticum. A memorial notice from the Berkeley Classics Department is found here.

Frede was a leading specialist in several fields of ancient philosophy, including skepticism. His two most important contributions in this area are "The Sceptic's Beliefs" and "The Sceptic's Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge".

Both papers - which have exerted a major influence on the subsequent research on ancient skepticism - can be found in M. Burnyeat and M. Frede (eds.), The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1997).