MA Seminars on Scepticism

University of London 2006

Seminar 1 (10/1). Historican background. The regress argument.

Reading:

Laurence BonJour. "Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?" American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 1-13 (skip sec. IV).

Seminar 2 (17/1). Immediate knowledge. Externalism.

Reading:

William P. Alston. "What's Wrong with Immediate Knowledge?" Synthese 55 (1983): 73-95.

Laurence BonJour. "Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge." In Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. V: Studies in Epistemology, edited by Peter French, Theodor Uehling, Jr. and Howard K. Wettstein, 53-73. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.

Seminar 3 (24/1). Cartesian scepticism. Closure. Underdetermination.

Reading:

Robert Nozick. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981 (read pp. 167-178, 197-217).

Fred Dretske. "Epistemic Operators." Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970): 1007-23.

Anthony Brueckner. "The Structure of the Skeptical Argument." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994): 827-35.

Seminar 4 (31/1). Contextualism.

Reading:

Keith DeRose. "Solving the Skeptical Problem." Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 1-52.

Stephen Schiffer. "Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1996): 317-33.

Seminar 5 (7/2). Neo-Mooreanism.

Reading:

James Pryor. "The Skeptic and the Dogmatist." Noûs 34 (2000): 517-49.

Alex Byrne. "How Hard Are the Sceptical Paradoxes?" Noûs 38 (2004): 299-325.