Skepticism – Between a Malevolent Use of Language and Positive Philosophical Attitude
Introduction
Skepticism is an ancient philosophical attitude. I have been skeptical about many forms of skepticism and I still am.[1] My argumentation against it was that skepticism is based on a malevolent use of language to prove something clearly paradoxical or contradictory. In a sense, all skeptical philosophy is impossible in the strongest sense of the word ‘impossible’. The grounding of this conclusion is very simple. The skeptics are unable to prove what they want, and they construct arguments whose nature is self-defeating in a very fundamental sense.
However, at the same time, skepticism is an unreplaceable component of all philosophical edifices and, beyond them, all human thinking. Among the best philosophers were deemed skeptical at one point and the accusation was almost invariably right. They were skeptical about something specific, and their arguments were to disprove a portion of the assumed shared beliefs to replace them with something different, being it a reformist or creative endeavor. Here I try to show why both tenets are true: radical skepticism is pointless and yet we need some form of it. Understanding how this is not a contradiction is the topic of this essay.
Skepticism and Its Philosophical Relevance
Skepticism is a philosophical attitude, not a philosophy. As an attitude, it is necessary and it consists in the unwillingness to accept anything as true or given or presumed beforehand. At the same time, this is not the primary objective of classic skepticism, whose goal was aligned with Stoicism and Epicureanism: peace of mind (ataraxia) from the ‘evils’ of the world.[2] We must start from the extreme form of it; that is, skepticism as a philosophy and not just as an attitude: “Sextus presents scepticism as a kind of philosophy, distinguished from others not by the content of its doctrines (there are none), but apparently by its attitude to philosophical problems and theses.”[3] According to this position, there is no solid foundation for any statement and proposition, no matter the origin, cause and formulation. The skeptical argument is the refuse of any possible argument at its extreme.