Brian C. Ribeiro’s Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers invites us to view the Pyrrhonist tradition as involving all those who share a commitment to the activity of Pyrrhonizing and develops fresh, provocative readings of Sextus, Montaigne, and Hume as radical Pyrrhonizing skeptics.

This book offers a comprehensive interpretation of Sextus Empiricus based on his own view of what he calls the distinctive character of skepticism. It focuses on basic topics highlighted by this ancient philosopher concerning Pyrrhonism, a kind of skepticism named for Pyrrho: its concept, its principles, its reason, its criteria, its goals. In the first part, the author traces distinct phases in the life and philosophical development of a talented person, from the pre-philosophical phase where philosophy was perceived as the solution to life's disturbing anomalies, through his initial philosophical investigation in order to find truth where the basic experience is that of a huge disagreement between philosophers, to the final phase where he finally recognises that his experience is similar to that of the skeptical school and adheres to skepticism. The second part is devoted to explain the nature of his skepticism. It presents an original interpretation, for it claims that the central role in Sextus’ Neo-Pyrrhonism is played by a skeptical logos, a rationale or way of reasoning. This is what unifies and articulates the skeptical orientation. The skeptic goes on investigating truth, but in a new condition, for he is now tranquil, and he has a skeptical method of his own. He has also acquired a special ability in order to balance both sides of an opposition, which involves a number of different skills. Finally, the author examines the skeptical life generated by this philosophical experience where he lives a life without opinions and dogmas; it is an engaged life, deeply concerned with our everyday actions and values. Readers will gain a deeper insight into the philosophy of Pyrrhonism as presented by Sextus Empiricus, as well as understand the meaning of anomalía, zétesis, epokhé, ataraxía, and other important ideas of this philosophy.

Political theory deals with profound questions about human nature, political principles, and the limits of knowledge. In Teaching Political Theory, Nicholas Tampio shows how political theorists may take a pluralistic approach to help students investigate the deepest levels of political life.

The first handbook on the topic of religious epistemology introduces and discusses topics fundamental to the epistemology of religious belief.

Examines how postwar French writers constitute the thinking subject and reshape its relation to the external social world. Joseph Acquisto analyzes the writings of three thinkers during and shortly after the Second World War who address the question of what it means to think, and what it means to constitute oneself as a thinking subject – at a time that seems to come "after everything"; with the ruins of attacked cities echoing the remains of a philosophical tradition that was confident in its establishment of human beings as rational, of reason leading to progress, and of both the self and the world as knowable. What Georges Bataille calls "inner experience" and Emil Cioran labels "thinking against oneself" is something akin to a drama; not a mere representation of the self in relation to the world, but a process of remapping the relation of subject to object of thought dialectically. Acquisto argues that both writers adopt an anti-systematic approach to thinking that implicates fragmentary writing as a way of turning answers about subject-object relations into questions. Acquisto contends that this stands in contrast to the approach of Clément Rosset, whose affirmation of the inaccessibility of the real leads to an anti-intellectual, grace-filled affirmation of life as it is given, under the guise of what he calls the "tragic." Bringing together thinkers that have seldom been discussed in a comparative light, Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset examines the affective dimensions of thought as experience and considers the political stakes of postwar thought as "out of order" with the world from which it springs.

This volume is dedicated to questions about the nature and method of metaphysics in Classical German Philosophy. Its chapters offer original investigations into the metaphysical projects of many of the major figures in German philosophy between Wolff and Hegel. The period of Classical German Philosophy was an extraordinarily rich one in the history of philosophy, especially for metaphysics. It includes some of the highest achievements of early modern rationalism, Kant’s critical revolution, and the various significant works of German Idealism that followed in Kant’s wake. The contributions to this volume critically examine certain common themes among metaphysical projects across this period, for example, the demand that metaphysics amount to a science, that it should be presented in the form of a system, or that it should proceed by means of demonstration from certain key first principles. This volume also includes material on influential criticisms of metaphysical projects of this kind. Metaphysics as a Science in Classical German Philosophy is a useful resource for contemporary metaphysicians and historians of philosophy interested in engaging with the history of the methodology and epistemology of metaphysics.

Impressions of Hume presents new essays from leading scholars in different philosophical, historiographical, and literary traditions to which Hume made defining contributions. Hume has made a variety of impressions on these different areas; his writings, philosophical and otherwise, may indeed be read in a number of different ways. For example, they can be taken as transparent vehicles for philosophical intuitions, problems, and arguments that are still at the centre of philosophical reflection today. On the other hand, there are readings which are interested in locating Hume's views against the background of concerns, debates and discussions of Hume's own time. And this is not all. Hume's texts may be read as highly sophisticated literary-cum-philosophical creations: in such cases, the reader's attention tends to be directed at issues of genre and persuasive strategies rather than on argument. Or they may be regarded as moments in the construction of the ideology of modernity, and as contributions to the legitimation of a given social order. As the true classics that they are, Hume's works are typical 'open texts', which present their readers of all provenances with a bounty of materials and inspirations. It is the editors' conviction that the borders between these approaches are far from neat; and that as much cross-fertilization as possible is to be promoted. Impressions of Hume amply demonstrates the rewards of such an approach.

The School of Doubt conducts a close philological and philosophical reading of Cicero’s Academica, a fragmentary work on sense-perception and Academic history written in the wake of Caesar’s victory in the civil wars (45 BCE). Focusing in turn on the author’s letters discussing the process of composition, the historiographical treatment of the Platonic tradition and the critical exploration of philosophical doubt, this volume presents Cicero as an original and sophisticated historian of philosophy and a radical figure in Western skeptical thought. Widely misconstrued as a technical treatise and a mere chronicle of the Greek debates on which it draws, the Academica here emerges as a key work in the evolution of Ciceronian philosophy and of ancient skepticism – and one that responds directly to the disintegration of Republican Rome.

Is it possible for belief or acceptance to be epistemically justified or rational without evidence? Non-evidentialism says, “Yes”. This original edited collection explores the tenability of non-evidentialism as a response to epistemological scepticism and examines potential applications within social psychology, psychiatry, and mathematics.