Panayot Butchvarov

The skepticism I propose to discuss concerns the reality of an external world of perceivable material objects. There are three questions our skeptic may ask. The first is nonmodal and nonepistemic: Are some of the objects we perceive real? The second is also nonmodal but epistemic: Do we know, or at least have evidence, that some of the objects we perceive are real? The third is both modal and epistemic: Can we know, or at least have evidence, that some of the objects we perceive are real? By definition, the epistemic questions are the ones the skeptic asks. But I shall take the first, the nonepistemic question as primary; it is, surely, also the one in which we, including the skeptic, are really interested. The traditional approach to skepticism has been to take it as asking one or both of the epistemic questions. I suggest that..

This book is a translation of the original Hungarian edition published in 1971. It belongs in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs, and would be of interest to those appreciative of that tradition. The book begins with a discussion of the general distinction between appearance and reality. According to the author, the distinction has at most a rudimentary application to nature below the social level, but is crucial for understanding society. So the book is primarily concerned with social appearances, where the notion of "being-forothers" has a clear application and accounts for the fact that appearances can have objectivity, a quasi-reality, and play a role in the process of historical development. The author "hazards" the thesis that "the individual person in the present of every age necessarily orientates himself in 'false', illusory bodies of thought". He criticizes the "bourgeois" phenomenological and neo-positivist notions of appearance as subjectivistic abstractions, divorced from social praxis. "Man encounters first the individual mass of things rather than phenomena. These data become phenomena only through practical work, when, by the aid of practice, science and technological progress, a systematic division is achieved in which we can discern what is 'behind' the thing immediately in front of us, i.e. essence".

This is a welcome addition to the growing literature in an ethics that is unself-consciously and unabashedly normative. It is concerned with what good lives are and how they can be achieved. At least in civilized contexts, good lives depend on self-direction, which itself depends on possessing the virtues of self-control, self-knowledge, moral sensitivity, and wisdom. These are discussed in detail and with insight. The other-regarding virtues of justice and benevolence are also acknowledged but not discussed, except that Kekes makes clear that his view has nothing to do with egoism; the reason for the omission seems to be his understandable desire to limit the scope of the book.

This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the classics of analytic philosophy. O'Connor's discussion of Moore's philosophy is intelligent, useful, and generally accurate and informed. The title of the book is somewhat misleading. For O'Connor discusses all major parts of Moore's philosophy except his ethics. Hence much of the book is concerned with Moore's defense of common sense, his philosophy of perception, and his conception of analysis, topics that have received much attention and on which it is difficult to say something new. But relatively little has been written on Moore's properly metaphysical views, especially those on universals and existence. Fortunately, O'Connor does devote more than a third of the book to these views.

One of the most important and perennially debated philosophical questions is whether we can have knowledge of the external world. Butchvarov here considers whether and how skepticism with regard to such knowledge can be refuted or at least answered. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception has any hope of providing a compelling response to the skeptic and introduces the radical innovation that the direct object of perceptual, and even dreaming and hallucinatory, experience is always a material object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads him to a metaphysics in which reality is ultimately constructed by human decisions out of objects that are ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to be either real or unreal.

Much of Jorge Gracia’s book is devoted to the definition of metaphysics. But he follows the traditional, though today ignored, distinction between nominal and real definitions. If we think of a definition of x as an answer to the question “What is x?”, an example of the former would be the entry under “bachelor” in a dictionary. An example of the latter would be the account in a chemistry textbook of the chemical structure of water. It is seldom clear that either sort of definition falls within the competence of philosophers, unless they happen to be also lexicographers or scientists. But on the nature of metaphysics, Gracia’s topic, of course philosophers alone are likely to be competent. Why? They alone are likely to know and to have reflected on what metaphysicians have done, i.e., to know the history of metaphysics. For such knowledge, we cannot do better than to go to someone like Professor Gracia.