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4Transzendentale Argumentation und SkeptizismusLang. 2000.Die Arbeit veranschaulicht anhand der Argumente von Kant, Strawson und Davidson, daß vier Kriterien für Transzendentalität identifiziert werden können: ein Reductio des skeptischen Zweifels, die Ablehnung einer Schema/Inhalt-Distinktion, die Etablierung einer transzendentalen Präsupposition sowie eine holistische Vorgehensweise. Das Ziel transzendentaler Argumentation ist, darzulegen, daß der skeptische Zweifel entweder lösbar oder nicht kohärent formulierbar ist. Es wird gezeigt, daß transzende…Read more
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3Worlds or Words Apart? Wittgenstein on Understanding Religious LanguageIn John Preston (ed.), Wittgenstein and Reason, Blackwell. 2008.This chapter contains sections titled: I II.
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3‘Resolution’ – an Illusion of Sense?In Volker Munz (ed.), Essays on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, De Gruyter. pp. 169-184. 2010.
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20Scepticism About Scepticism or the Very Idea of a Global ‘Vat-Language’Topoi 42 (1): 91-105. 2023.This paper aims to motivate a scepticism about scepticism in contemporary epistemology. I present the sceptic with a dilemma: On one parsing of the BIV (brain-in-a-vat) scenario, the second premise in a closure-based sceptical argument will turn out false, because the scenario is refutable; on another parsing, the scenario collapses into incoherence, because the sceptic cannot even save the appearances. I discuss three different ways of cashing out the BIV scenario: ‘Recent Envatment’ (RE), ‘Lif…Read more
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25Introspective DistinguishabilityMidwest Studies in Philosophy 45 241-256. 2021.It is generally thought that if introspective distinguishability were available, it would provide an answer to scepticism about perceptual knowledge by enabling us to tell the difference between a good case perceptual experience and a bad kind. This paper challenges this common assumption by showing that even if ID were available, it would not advance our case against scepticism. The conclusion to draw from this result is not to concede to scepticism, however, but rather to give up on the idea t…Read more
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56Précis of The Illusion of DoubtInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1-6. forthcoming.The Illusion of Doubt shows that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of our evidential situation—the view that my epistemic grounds in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ cases must be the same. It is this picture which issues both a standing invitation to radical scepticism and ensures that there is no way of getting out of it while agreeing to the sceptic’s terms. The sceptical problem cannot, therefore, be answered ‘directly’. Rather, the assumptions that give rise to…Read more
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43Response to CriticsInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1-17. forthcoming.In this paper I respond to the objections and comments made by Ranalli, Williams, and Moyal-Sharrock, participants in a symposium on my book on scepticism called The Illusion of Doubt.
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25IntroductionInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (3): 179-182. 2019.This introduction provides an overview of the content of the papers published in the special issue on epistemic vice and forms of scepticism.
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64Epistemic Angst, Intellectual Courage and Radical ScepticismInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (3): 206-222. 2019.The overarching aim of this paper is to persuade the reader that radical scepticism is driven less by independently plausible arguments and more by a fear of epistemic limitation which can be overcome. By developing the Kierkegaardian insight that knowledge requires courage, I show that we are not, as potential knowers, just passive recipients of a passing show of putatively veridical information, we also actively need to put ourselves in the way of it by learning to resist certain forms of epis…Read more
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33The aesthetic as mirror of faith in Kierkegaard's Fear and TremblingEuropean Journal of Philosophy 27 (3): 661-674. 2019.One of the most intractable issues in Kierkegaard scholarship continues to be the question of what one is to make of the relation between infinite resignation and faith in Fear and Trembling. Most commentators follow Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author in claiming that progression to faith is a “linear” process that requires infinite resignation as a first step. The problem with such a reading is that it leads to paradox: It seems to require attributing to the “knight of faith” two inconsistent be…Read more
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20How Threatening are Local Sceptical Scenarios?Wittgenstein-Studien 10 (1): 261-278. 2019.In this paper I distinguish between ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of ‘envatment’. I show that recent envatment arguments work similarly to arguments from perceptual illusion and that neither of them are able, by themselves, to get us ‘global’ scepticism. Consequently, motivating the radical sceptical idea that all of our perceptual beliefs might be false is harder than it looks.
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25‘Meaning-dawning’ in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks: a Kierkegaardian reading and critiqueBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (3): 540-556. 2018.ABSTRACTIn this paper, I am going to propose a new reading of Wittgenstein’s cryptic talk of ‘accession or loss of meaning’ in the Notebooks that draws both on Wittgenstein’s later work on aspect-perception, as well as on the thoughts of a thinker whom Wittgenstein greatly admired: Søren Kierkegaard. I will then go on to argue that, its merits apart, there is something existentially problematic about the conception that Wittgenstein is advocating. For the renunciation of the comforts of the worl…Read more
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33Beliefs-in-a-VatProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117 (2): 141-161. 2017.The over-arching claim that I intend to defend in this paper is that while widespread ‘local’ error is conceivable, we cannot, in the end, make sense of the radical sceptical idea that all our perceptual beliefs might be false – that no one has, as it were, ever been in touch with an ‘external world’ at all. To this end, I will show that an asymmetry exists between ‘local’ and ‘global’ sceptical scenarios, such that the possibility of ‘local’ error does not imply that ‘global’ error must also be…Read more
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36RupertRead and Matthew A.Lavery (eds.), Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein Debate (New York: Routledge, 2011). xi + 200, price £24.99 pb (review)Philosophical Investigations 36 (1): 83-87. 2013.
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6Vom Zweifel zur Verzweiflung: Grundbegriffe der Existenzphilosophie Sören Kierkegaards (review)European Journal of Philosophy 12 (1): 145-148. 2004.Books Reviewed:Kristin Kaufmann,Annemarie Pieper, Søren Kierkegaard.
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Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on religious beliefIn Ulrich Arnswald (ed.), In Search of Meaning: Ludwig Wittgenstein on Ethics, Mysticism and Religion, Universitätsverlag Karlsruhe. 2009.
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76Review of Hans-Johann Glock & John Hyman (eds.), Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: Essays for P.M.S. Hacker (review)Analysis. forthcoming.
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81Epistemological Disjunctivism by Duncan PritchardAnalysis 75 (4): 604-615. 2015.1. In this exciting and ambitious book, Duncan Pritchard defends a novel conception of perceptual epistemic grounds, which can both be factive and reflectively available to the agent. Pritchard calls this position the ‘holy grail’ of epistemology for its power to undercut two of contemporary epistemology’s most central problems: the epistemic internalism/externalism controversy and radical scepticism. While Pritchard’s book manages to make a convincing case for why one should accept epistemologi…Read more
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51The Illusion of DoubtOxford University Press UK. 2016.The Illusion of Doubt confronts one of the most important questions in philosophy and beyond: what can we know? The radical sceptic's answer is 'not very much' if we cannot prove that we are not subject to deception. For centuries philosophers have been impressed by the radical sceptic's move, but this book shows that the radical sceptical problem turns out to be an illusion created by a mistaken picture of our evidential situation. This means that we don't need to answer the radical sceptical p…Read more
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25Meaning and Conversational Impropriety in Sceptical ContextsMetaphilosophy 47 (3): 431-448. 2016.According to “disjunctivist neo-Mooreanism”—a position Duncan Pritchard develops in a recent book—it is possible to know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses, even though it is conversationally inappropriate to claim such knowledge. In a recent paper, on the other hand, Pritchard expounds an “überhinge” strategy, according to which one cannot know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, as “hinge propositions” are necessarily groundless. The present article argues that neither strategy is en…Read more
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50Art and the ‘Morality System’: The Case of Don GiovanniEuropean Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 1025-1043. 2013.Mozart's great opera, Don Giovanni, poses a number of significant philosophical and aesthetic challenges, and yet it remains, for the most part, little discussed by contemporary philosophers. A notable exception to this is Bernard Williams's important paper, ‘Don Juan as an Idea’, which contains an illuminating discussion of Kierkegaard's ground-breaking interpretation of the opera, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic’, in Either/Or. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author's approach he…Read more
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Wittgensteinian Approaches to ReligionIn Graham Robert Oppy (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, Routledge. 2015.
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126Review: Stephen Mulhall: Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations 243-315 (review)Mind 117 (468): 1108-1112. 2008.
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138‘Hinge Propositions’ and the ‘Logical’ Exclusion of DoubtInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (2-3): 165-181. 2016._ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 165 - 181 Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘hinge propositions’—those propositions that stand fast for us and around which all empirical enquiry turns—remains controversial and elusive, and none of the recent attempts to make sense of it strike me as entirely satisfactory. The literature on this topic tends to divide into two camps: either a ‘quasi-epistemic’ reading is offered that seeks to downplay the radical nature of Wittgenstein’s proposal by assimilating his tho…Read more
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41Vom Zweifel zur verzweiflung: Grundbegriffe der existenzphilosophie sören kierkegaardsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 12 (1). 2004.Books Reviewed:Kristin Kaufmann,Annemarie Pieper, Søren Kierkegaard
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66McDowellian Neo-Mooreanism?International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (3): 202-217. 2013.In a series of recent articles, Duncan Pritchard argues for a ‘neo-Moorean’ interpretation of John McDowell’s anti-sceptical strategy. Pritchard introduces a distinction between ‘favouring’ and ‘discriminating’ epistemic grounds in order to show that within the radical sceptical context an absence of ‘discriminating’ epistemic grounds allowing one to distinguish brain-in-a-vat from non-brain-in-a-vat scenarios does not preclude possessing knowledge of the denials of sceptical hypotheses. I argue…Read more
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63A confusion of the spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on philosophy and religionOxford University Press. 2007.As well as contributing to contemporary debate about how to read Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's work, A Confusion of the Spheres addresses issues which not ...
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