SOSA ON SKEPTICISM

Abstract: Ernest Sosa has recently articulated an insightful response to skepticism and, in particular, to the dream argument. The response relies on two independent moves. First, Sosa offers the imagination model of dreaming according to which no assertions are ever made in dreams and no beliefs are involved there. As a result, it is possible to distinguish dreaming from being awake, and the dream argument is blocked. Second, Sosa develops a virtue epistemology according to which in appropriately normal conditions our perceptual beliefs will be apt. Hence, in these conditions, we will have at least animal knowledge, and the conclusion of the dream argument is undermined. In this article, I examine various moves that the skeptic can make to resist Sosa's challenge, and I contrast the proposal to a neo-Pyrrhonian stance. In the end, there is surprisingly little disagreement about the status of ordinary perceptual beliefs in the two stances.     

PROBABILITY AND SKEPTICISM ABOUT REASON IN HUME'S TREATISE

At the crux of Descartes's general metaphysics and epistemology are his accounts of substances, attributes and ideas of substances and attributes. In spite of the centrality of these theories, there is wide disagreement among scholars about how to interpret them. I approach these debates by focusing on Descartes's theory of the infinite substance – God. I argue that God's attributes are neither individual, inseparable properties that inhere in God (contra Kenny, Wilson, Curley, Hoffman) nor deductions from God (contra Lennon), but attributions that can consistently be made to God. On this account, the diversity of God's attributes is due to how meditators refer to the various cognitive routes they take to clear and distinct perceptions of God; what makes a meditator's clear and distinct perception of God more distinct is that it becomes more stable – the meditator can more easily retain and regain the perception. Other virtues of this interpretation include accounts of the following: the puzzling remarks about essences that Descartes makes to Gassendi; what founds conceptual distinctions in reality; and why the Cartesian meditator ‘proves’ the existence of God several times in the Meditations.     

CONCEPTS AND OBJECTIVITY

Some philosophers—indeed, a large number—have presented us with a picture of human knowledge which makes it problematic as to whether we can ever be acquainted with an objective world. Given the nature of perception and thought as characterized by, e.g., Descartes and Hume, there is a problem about how anything I can be aware of can have any sort of objective status; there is a problem of how my awareness of anything can amount to anything other than its merely seeming to me that things are thus and so. And of course many of these same philosophers, and other philosophers, have tried in all sorts of different ways to counter this skeptical thrust. Some, like Descartes, have argued that although human perceiving and human thinking are themselves purely subjective affairs, nevertheless the content of some of our thoughts and ideas is such that it (the content) could not exist if there did not also exist certain things of a quite objective nature. Another way of putting Descartes' thesis is to say that although all our concepts of things are, as concepts, purely subjective entities, nevertheless the content of some of our concepts requires that there exist certain objective entities.     

MACHINES, BRAINS, AND PERSONS

Abstract. This paper explores the suggestion that our conscious experience is embodied in, rather than interactive with, our brain activity, and that the distinctive brain correlate of conscious experience lies at the level of global functional organization. To speak of either brains or computers as thinking is categorically inept, but whether stochastic mechanisms using internal experimentation rather than rule-following to determine behavior could embody conscious agency is argued to be an open question, even in light of the Christian doctrine of man. Mechanistic brain science does nothing to discredit Christian experience in dialogue with God or the Christian hope of eternal life.     

NO CLOSURE ON SKEPTICISM

This article is a response to an important objection that Sherrilyn Roush has made to the standard closure‐based argument for skepticism, an argument that has been studied over the past couple of decades. If Roush's objection is on the mark, then this would be a quite significant finding. We argue that her objection fails.