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Books on the topic 'Philosophical scepticism'
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1
Hume's scepticism and realism: His two profound arguments against the senses in an enquiry concerning human understanding. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2007.
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Williams, Michael. Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Philosophical Theory). Blackwell Publishers, 1992.
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Mehigan, Tim. The Scepticism of Heinrich von Kleist. Edited by Paul Hamilton. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696383.013.14.
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This chapter presents a philosophical reading of the writer Heinrich von Kleist (1788–1811) and his oeuvre. Kleist’s connections with the movement of Romanticism only become properly evident when measured against the weight of philosophical problems Kleist felt to be pressing even before his career as a writer began. The most considerable of these was the problem of philosophical scepticism, a by-product of his early encounter with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The picture of Kleist presented here is one of an earnest mind in search of an answer to a problem that emerged in the philosophical discussion after Kant and, in one sense at least, has never left us.
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Stroud, Barry. Scepticism and the Senses. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198809753.003.0007.
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This chapter considers some lessons that can be learned from philosophical scepticism and some strategies to be pursued in understanding human knowledge in the right way. It examines the conception of perceptual experience and what is needed for a more accurate—and hence more trouble-free—account of what we can and do in fact perceive. It also discusses René Descartes’s sceptical argument and his notion of perceptual knowledge before concluding with an explanation of what it calls propositional perception to account for knowledge of the world. It argues that we can perceive particular objects without believing or knowing anything about them. It is only with such ‘propositional’ objects of perception that direct perceptual knowledge of the world is possible, since knowledge is knowledge of what is so.
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Pritchard, Duncan. Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198829164.001.0001.
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Throughout history, scepticism and the urge to question accepted truths has been a powerful force for change and growth. A healthy amount of scepticism is widely encouraged, but when is such scepticism legitimate and when is it problematic? Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction explores both the advantages of scepticism and how it can have unhelpful social consequences in generating distrust. It considers the role of scepticism as the source of contemporary social and political movements such as climate change denial, post-truth politics, and fake news. It also examines the philosophical arguments for a radical form of scepticism, which maintains that knowledge is impossible.
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Streumer, Bart. Effects, Parallels, Progress. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198785897.003.0012.
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This chapter first describes the effects of coming close to believing the error theory. It then sketches how certain other philosophical views can also be defended by arguing that we cannot believe these views: scepticism about moral responsibility, eliminativism about propositional attitudes, scepticism about truth, and dialetheism. The chapter also explains how philosophers should modify their methodology if there can be true philosophical theories that we cannot believe. It concludes that we should not reject a philosophical theory because it is literally hard to believe: to make progress in philosophy, we should make a sharp distinction between a theory’s truth and our ability to believe it.
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Macleod, Colin M. Are Children’s Rights Important? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786429.003.0010.
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This paper explores the nature and justificatory basis of children’s rights with a view to determining whether children’s rights are important. Although children’s rights are frequently invoked in legal and political discourse, they often generate controversy: their practical and theoretical significance is sometimes challenged. Many states acknowledge children’s rights and yet fail to secure many of the most basic interests of children putatively protected by their rights. Moreover, the suggestion that children are the bearers of genuine moral rights is sometimes met with philosophical scepticism. This chapter distinguishes different forms of scepticism about children’s rights and explores whether doubts about the theoretical and practical importance of children’s rights can be vindicated. I argue that reticence about children’s rights is not justified. Given a proper construal of children’s rights it is appropriate both to treat children as genuine bearers of rights and to view their rights as morally and politically important.
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Villanueva, Enrique. Naturalism and Normativity (Philosophical Issues). Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1994.
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Brooke, Alice. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816829.003.0001.
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The Introduction to this study explores the philosophical context in which Sor Juana wrote her Eucharistic plays. It traces the transition from a mindset characterized by scepticism and Neostoicism to the advent of the New Philosophy and an empirical approach to the material world. In particular, it analyses how two authors, Athanasius Kircher and Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, attempted to reconcile empirical ideas with a Christian understanding of the natural world as a reflection of the divine. This chapter then demonstrates how traces of a similar philosophical approach are present in Sor Juana’s works, in particular in her explorations of the natural world, her writings on allegory, and her engagement with Christian figuration.
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Magri, Tito. Hume's Imagination. Oxford University PressOxford, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192864147.001.0001.
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Abstract This book proposes a new and systematic interpretation of the nature, function, structure, and importance of the imagination in Book 1, Of the understanding, of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. The proposed interpretation has deeply revisionary implications for Hume’s philosophy of mind and for his naturalism, epistemology, and stance to scepticism. The book remedies a surprising blind spot in Hume scholarship and contributes to the current, lively philosophical debate on imagination. Hume’s philosophy, if rightly understood, gives suggestions about how to treat imagination as a mental natural kind, its cognitive complexity and variety of functions notwithstanding. Hume’s imagination is a faculty of inference and the source of a distinctive kind of ideas, which complement our sensible, mental representation of objects. Our cognitive nature, restricted to the representation of objects and of their relations, would leave ordinary and philosophical cognition seriously underdetermined and expose us to scepticism. Only the non-representational, inferential faculty of the imagination can put in place and vindicate ideas like causation, body, and self, which support our cognitive practices. The book reconstructs how Hume’s naturalist inferentialism about the imagination develops this fundamental insight. Its five parts deal with the dualism of representation and inference; the explanation of generality and modality; the production of causal ideas; the production of spatial and temporal content and the distinction of an external world of bodies and an internal one of selves; and the replacement of the understanding with imagination in the analysis of cognition and in epistemology.
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Vickers, Peter. Identifying Future-Proof Science. Oxford University PressOxford, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192862730.001.0001.
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Abstract Is science getting at the truth? The sceptics—those who spread doubt about science—often employ a simple argument: scientists were ‘sure’ in the past, and then they ended up being wrong. Such sceptics draw on dramatic quotes from eminent scientists such as Lord Kelvin, who reportedly stated at the turn of the 20th century ‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now’, shortly before physics was dramatically transformed. They ask: given the history of science, wouldn’t it be naïve to think that current scientific theories reveal ‘the truth’, and will never be discarded in favour of other theories? Through a combination of historical investigation and philosophical-sociological analysis, Identifying Future-Proof Science defends science against such potentially dangerous scepticism. It is argued that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever, so long as science continues. How do we identify future-proof claims? This appears to be a new question for science scholars, and not an unimportant one. It is argued that the best way to identify future-proof science is to avoid any attempt to analyse the relevant first-order scientific evidence, instead focusing purely on second-order evidence. Specifically, a scientific claim is future-proof when the relevant scientific community is large, international, and diverse, and at least 95 per cent of that community would describe the claim as a ‘scientific fact’. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity.
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Bender, John W. Aesthetic Realism 2. Edited by Jerrold Levinson. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279456.003.0004.
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Aesthetic property realism would seem to be committed to at least some version of the following two claims: (a) there is a distinctive category of predications or attributions used in describing art works and other objects of our aesthetic attention; and (b) it is correct to construe these attributions as asserting that certain aesthetic properties exist and are objectively true of art works and other objects. Although anti-realist challenges have focused mainly on deconstructing (b), there has also been considerable scepticism over (a), i.e. over the very concept of aesthetic properties. The distinction between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic is one of those distinctions that has strong intuitive credibility but yields grudgingly to philosophical analysis.
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Shaw, Daniel. Stanley Cavell and the Magic of Hollywood Films. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474455701.001.0001.
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Stanley Cavell’s writings on film as a visual medium, and as making myths that address our scepticism about the values that allow us to see everyday life worth living, are emerging as highly influential in the burgeoning area of aesthetics that deals with the philosophy of film. The intent of this book is to trace the philosophical roots of his world view, summarize his general approach to the filmic medium, explain his genre theories, and offer original readings of types of film which are different from the comedies and melodramas that he spoke of most extensively. Throughout, I will be addressing his answer to the question “What do the Movies do best?”: of all the arts, the filmic medium is best at persuading its viewers to believe in the values it embodies. The book champions Cavell’s approach to philosophizing about film, as the most healthy and fruitful paradigm for discussing film in a philosophical context.
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Hume, David. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Millican. Oxford University Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/owc/9780199549900.001.0001.
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Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.' Thus ends David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the 'sophistry and illusion' of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or indeed our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded scepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the 'superstition' of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and this edition places it in its historical and philosophical context.
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Hamilton, Andy. Coleridge and Conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799511.003.0010.
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Coleridge’s place in conservative and liberal traditions of thought is assessed in Chapter 9. In the decades after his death, Coleridge was regarded as a conservative. Mill saw him as a ‘Tory philosopher’; he viewed Coleridgean conservatism as some have seen Burke’s, as a Second, not Counter-, Enlightenment view. Burke does not figure as a conservative in Mill’s discussion. However, late nineteenth-century constructors of an ideology of English conservatism preferred to appeal to Burke’s scepticism about reason, while Coleridge’s philosophical prestige was waning. Coleridge’s affiliation with Continental-style ‘rational conservatism’ is also assessed. Competing conceptions of reason condition his rationalism. The picture is similar when one considers the relation between his conservatism and his radicalism. With every major conservative thinker—Burke, Coleridge, Oakeshott—this question of progressiveness versus conservatism arises.
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Storrie, Stefan, ed. Berkeley's Three Dialogues. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198755685.001.0001.
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Published in 1713 when Berkeley was twenty-nine years old, the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous was the last of a trio of works, the others being the New Theory of Vision (1709) and the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I (1710), that cemented Berkeley’s position as one of the truly great philosophers of the western canon. The dialogues were Berkeley’s most influential philosophical work in the eighteenth century, going through five editions compared to the Principles’ two. It was also, unlike the Principles, translated into French (1750) and German (1756, 1781) and therefore instrumental for spreading Berkeley’s philosophical views on the continent. The Three Dialogues is a dramatization of Berkeley’s philosophy in which the two protagonists, Hylas and Philonous, debate the full range of Berkeleyan themes: the rejection of material substance, the nature of perception and reality, the limits of human knowledge, and his approach to the perceived threats of scepticism, atheism, and immorality. This book is a collection of twelve essays on Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The first eight papers have been arranged to broadly follow the general structure of the dialogues; the last four papers consider the work in its broader philosophical context.
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McDermid, Douglas. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198789826.003.0001.
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This book traces the career of Scottish common sense realism through four developmental stages: its humble beginnings in the writings of Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), its definitive formulation by Thomas Reid (1710–96), its elevation to the status of academic orthodoxy by Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) and Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), and—finally—its dramatic repudiation and overcoming by the idealist and rationalist James Frederick Ferrier (1808–64). The book has four overarching aims: (1) to show that Kames, Reid, Stewart, Hamilton, and Ferrier are members of a rich and underappreciated philosophical tradition; (2) to explain how each of them approaches the problems of perception, realism, and scepticism; (3) to re-contextualize some of the achievements of Reid; and (4) to win a wider audience for the neglected work of Ferrier, a thinker of rare daring and originality.
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Aquino, Frederick D. The British Naturalist Tradition. Edited by Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198718284.013.8.
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This chapter argues that Newman draws upon the British Naturalist tradition in fresh ways, especially in his effort to take up the challenge of epistemological scepticism. It examines the scholarly literature that has drawn attention to how John Locke and David Hume feature as formative influences on Newman’s philosophical thought while providing a closer look at how Newman engages with and appropriates insights from the Naturalist tradition in his own context. This chapter also furnishes two examples (the trustworthiness of our cognitive faculties and conscience as a natural element of our mind) to illustrate the extent to which Newman is working within the Naturalist tradition. It concludes with two areas that deserve further reflection and development, namely, a more constructive understanding of the relationship between Newman’s naturalized epistemology and natural theology and a deeper analysis of how Newman appropriates and transforms the British Naturalist tradition.
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Harris, James A. Hume and the Common Sense Philosophers. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198783909.003.0008.
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Hume anticipated the principal objection that the Scottish common sense philosophers would have to his scepticism. In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding he sought to make it clear that the scepticism of the Treatise was not conceived of as a scepticism that would affect everyday life. It was not a scepticism that would destabilize moral and other practical beliefs. The common sense philosophers misrepresented Hume’s scepticism insofar as they failed to grasp this point, and therefore failed to grasp the crucial difference between Hume’s scepticism and ancient scepticism. Despite this misunderstanding on their part, common sense philosophers like Campbell and Reid were taken seriously by Hume. The fact that he did not respond in detail to their criticisms is not evidence that he thought them philosophically incompetent.
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Franks, Paul. Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Post-Kantian Philosophy. Edited by Herman Cappelen, Tamar Szabó Gendler, and John Hawthorne. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668779.013.1.
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This article examines three moments of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Kantianism, Post-Kantian Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism. It elucidates the distinctive methods of a tradition that has never entirely disappeared and is now acknowledged once again as the source of contemporary insights. It outlines two problematics—naturalist scepticism and historicist nihilism—threatening the possibility of metaphysics. The first concerns sceptical worries about reason, emerging from attempts to extend the methods of natural science to the study of human beings. Kant’s project of a critical and transcendental analysis of reason, with its distinctive methods, should be considered a response. The second arises from the development of new methods of historical inquiry, seeming to undermine the very possibility of individual agency. Also considered are Kant’s successors’ revisions of the critical and transcendental analysis of reason, undertaken to overcome challenges confronting the original versions of Kant’s methods.
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Bow, C. B., ed. Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198783909.001.0001.
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This book explores the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, the Scottish ‘school’ of common sense philosophy developed as a viable alternative to modern philosophical scepticism known as the ‘Ideal Theory’ or ‘the way of ideas’. The philosophical writings of Thomas Reid and David Hume factor prominently in the volume as influential authors of competing ideas in the history and philosophy of common sense. In the chapters of this volume, which all embody original and innovative research, the contributors recover anticipations of Reid’s version of common sense in seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism; re-evaluate Reid’s position in the realism versus sentimentalism dichotomy; shed new light on the nature of the ‘constitution’ in the anatomy of the mind; identify changes in the nature of sense perception throughout Reid’s published and unpublished works; examine Reid on the non-theist implications of Hume’s philosophy; show how ‘polite’ literature shaped James Beattie’s version of common sense; reveal Hume’s response to common sense philosophers; explore English criticisms and construction of the ‘Scotch school’; and illustrate how Dugald Stewart’s refashioning of common sense responded to a new age and the British reception of German Idealism. In recovering the ways in which Scottish common sense philosophy originally developed in response to the Ideal Theory in Britain during the long eighteenth century, this volume takes an important step toward a more complete understanding of ‘the Scottish philosophy’ in the age of Enlightenment.
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Stuart-Buttle, Tim. From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198835585.001.0001.
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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a period of remarkable intellectual vitality in British philosophy, as figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith attempted to explain the origins and sustaining mechanisms of civil society. Their insights continue to inform how political and moral theorists think about the world in which we live. The aim of this book is to reconstruct a debate which preoccupied contemporaries, but which seems arcane to us today. This concerned the relationship between reason and revelation as the two sources of mankind’s knowledge, particularly in the ethical realm: to what extent, they asked, could reason alone discover the content and obligatory character of morality? This was held to be a historical, rather than merely a theoretical question: had the philosophers of pre-Christian antiquity, ignorant of Christ, been able satisfactorily to explain the moral universe? What role did natural theology play in their ethical theories—and was it consistent with the teachings delivered by revelation? Much recent scholarship has drawn attention to the early-modern interest in two late Hellenistic philosophical traditions—Stoicism and Epicureanism. Yet in the English context, three figures above all—John Locke, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume—quite deliberately and explicitly identified their approaches with Cicero as the representative of an alternative philosophical tradition, critical of both the Stoic and the Epicurean: academic scepticism. All argued that Cicero provided a means of addressing what they considered to be the most pressing question facing contemporary philosophy: the relationship between moral theology and moral philosophy.
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Brooke, Alice. The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816829.001.0001.
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This study analyses the autos sacramentales, or Eucharistic plays, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95). It focusses on their relationship to the changing currents of philosophical thought in the late-seventeenth century Hispanic world, from a mindset characterized by scepticism, Neostoicism, and suspicion of the material world as a source of truth, to an empirical approach to the natural world that understood the information received by the senses as a fallible, yet useful, provisional source of knowledge. By examining each play in turn, along with the introductory loa with which they were intended to be performed, the study explores how each drama seeks to integrate empirical ideas with a Catholic understanding of transubstantiation. At the same time, each individual study identifies new sources for these plays, and demonstrates how these illuminate, or nuance, present readings of the works. The study of El divino Narciso employs a previously little-known source to illuminate its Christological readings, as well as Sor Juana’s engagement with notions of wit and conceptism. The analysis of El cetro de José explores her presentation of different approaches to perception to emphasize the importance of both the material and the transcendent in understanding the sacraments. The final section, on San Hermenegildo, explores the influence of the Christianized stoicism of Justus Lipsius, and demonstrates how Sor Juana used this work to attempt her most ambitious reconciliation of an empirical approach to the material world with a Neostoic approach to Christian morality and orthodox Catholic sacramental theology.
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Proops, Ian. The Fiery Test of Critique. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199656042.001.0001.
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The book aims to provide a comprehensive study of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of Kant’s first Critique. It argues that Kant conceives of ‘critique’ as a kind of winnowing exercise, aimed to separate the wheat of good metaphysics from the chaff of bad. However, he uses a less familiar metaphor to make this point, namely, that of ‘the fiery test of critique’. This turns out to be, not a medieval ordeal (a trial by fire), but rather a metallurgical assay: so-called ‘cupellation’—a procedure in which ore samples are tested for their precious-metal content. The upshot is that critique has a positive, investigatory side: it seeks not merely to eliminate the dross of bad ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics but also to uncover any hidden nuggets of value that might be contained in traditional speculative metaphysics. There are both gold and silver to be found. The gold is the indirect proof of Transcendental Idealism afforded by the resolution of the Antinomies, the silver Kant’s defence of theoretically grounded ‘doctrinal beliefs’ in a wise and great originator and in an afterlife. In the course of making these points, the book engages with Kant’s views on a number of central problems in philosophy and meta-philosophy, including: the explanation of the enduring human impulse towards metaphysics, correct philosophical method, the limits of self-knowledge, the possibility of human freedom, the resolution of metaphysical paradox (‘Antinomy’), the justification of faith, the nature of scepticism, and the role of ‘as if’ reasoning in natural science.
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Andrew, Bowie. Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192847737.001.0001.
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Much of contemporary philosophy, especially in the analytical tradition, regards aesthetics as of lesser significance than epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. In Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy Andrew Bowie, in contrast, explores the idea that art and aesthetics have crucial implications for those areas of philosophy. In the modern period, the growth of warranted scientific knowledge is accompanied both by heightened concern with epistemological scepticism and by a new philosophical attention to art and the beauty of nature. This suggests that modernity involves problems concerning how human beings make sense of the world that go beyond questions of knowledge, and are reflected in the arts. The relationship of art to philosophy is explored in Montaigne, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Schelling, the early German Romantics, and Hegel. The book then considers Cassirer’s and the hermeneutic tradition’s exploration of close links between meaning in language and in art. The work of Karl Polanyi, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Dewey, and others is used to investigate how the modern sciences and the development of capitalism change both humankind’s relations to nature and the nature of value, and so affect the role of art in human self-understanding. The aesthetic dimensions of modern philosophy help to uncover often neglected historical shifts in how ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are conceived. Seeing art as a kind of philosophy, and philosophy as a kind of art reveals unresolved tensions between the different cultural domains of the modern world, and questions some of the orientation of contemporary philosophy.
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Berto, Francesco. Topics of Thought. Oxford University PressOxford, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192857491.001.0001.
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Abstract This book concerns mental states such as thinking that Obama is tall, imagining that there will be a climate change catastrophe, knowing that one is not a brain in a vat, or believing that Martina Navratilova is the greatest tennis player ever. Such states are usually understood as having intentionality, that is, as being about things or situations to which the mind is directed. The contents of such states are often taken to be propositions. The book presents a new framework for the logic of thought, so understood—an answer to the question: Given that one thinks (believes, knows, etc.) something, what else must one think (ditto) as a matter of logic? This should depend on the propositions which make for the contents of the relevant thoughts. And the book defends the idea that propositions should be individuated hyperintensionally, i.e. not just by the sets of worlds at which they are true (as in standard ‘intensional’ possible worlds semantics), but also by what they are about: their topic or subject matter. Thus, the logic of thought should be ‘topic-sensitive’. After the philosophical foundations have been presented in Chapters 1−2, Chapter 3 develops a theory of Topic-Sensitive Intentional Modals (TSIMs): modal operators representing attitude ascriptions, which embed a topicality or subject matter constraint. Subsequent chapters explore applications ranging from mainstream epistemology (dogmatism, scepticism, fallibilism: Chapter 4), to the nature of suppositional thinking and imagination (Chapter 5), conditional belief and belief revision (Chapter 6), framing effects (Chapter 7), probabilities and indicative conditionals (Chapter 8).
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Scott, Dominic. Justice and Persuasion in the Republic. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198817277.003.0004.
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In the Republic Socrates attempts to defend the value of justice, but thinks that such a defence can operate at different levels. The ‘longer route’ defends the value of justice by appealing to the Forms, and more generally the metaphysical worldview sketched in books V–VII. To follow this route would ultimately require philosophical understanding. The ‘shorter route’, as pursued in books II–IV and VIII–IX, defends justice only by appeal to the psychology of the tripartite soul aided by political analysis, but without reference to the Forms. Though the shorter route is appropriate when addressed to sympathetic interlocutors, such as Glaucon and Adeimantus, other arguments take the longer route and are addressed to more radical sceptics about justice, such as Thrasymachus.
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Hamilton, William. An Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1782): bound with Scepticus Britannicus's The Necessity of Atheism (1811) and ... (The Thoemmes Library of British Philosophy). Thoemmes Continuum, 2004.
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Schüz, Peter, ed. Religion und Lebensweg im 19. Jahrhundert. Verlag Karl Alber, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/9783495998793.
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200 years ago, the first edition of "Theodor oder des Zweiflers Weihe" (“Theodore Or The Sceptics Conversion”) by W.M. L. de Wette was published, which is still considered one of the most important theological novels of its time. On the occasion of the ne edition of de Wettes didactic “Bildungsroman”, the accompanying scholarly volume open up theological, philosophical and literary approaches to the background of its epoch and interpretation. The focus of the interdisciplinary contributions lies on the interdependencies between religion, aesthetics and individual biography in their meaning for the 'inner world' of religious life and piety in the past and present. With contributions by Prof. Dr. Markus Buntfuß, Prof. Dr. Alf Christophersen, Prof. Dr. Ruth Conrad, Prof. Dr. Markus Iff, Prof. Dr. Jan Rohls, PD. Dr. Peter Schüz, Prof. Dr. Rolf Selbmann and Prof. Dr. Daniel Weidner.