Utterly Crazy

It may be because it’s late and I’m tired, but for some reason the book review quoted from below had me laughing all the way through. I hope the book is not really as bad as this grumpy reviewer found it to be.

The book being reviewed is Philosophy from a Skeptical Persepective by Joseph Agassi and Abraham Deidan. The reviewer is Charles Landesman and it’s in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews  (Dec 7, 2008).

Here’s a bit from the middle. It’s like this all the way through:

We get closer to the meaning of “skepticism” when the authors claim that no statement is certain or plausible or demonstrable or justified or corroborated or indubitable. (ix, 2) This is supplemented by related claims such as “No position is demonstrable” (ix), “Our ignorance is unavoidable” (x), “Humans are always prone to make mistakes” (11), “All statements are doubtful” (39) Just as it would appear that we are in pretty poor epistemic shape, being unable to get beyond the evil demon, we find a somewhat weaker version: “There is simply no way to guarantee that any discourse can be certain or plausible in the epistemological sense of these concepts.” The lack of a guarantee means, I think, to allude to the apparent lack of success from the time of ancient Pyrrhonism to the present day in finding a general criterion of truth that itself could be proven to be true by a line of argument that is neither circular nor generative of an infinite regress. One would think that consulting Descartes might be of interest here. However, the authors think so little of Descartes as to say that the “evil spirit hypothesis” and “the solipsist hypothesis” as well as the related brain in a vat hypothesis are “utterly crazy” and therefore need not be taken seriously unless one is insane. (25-26)

The last paragraph of the review reminds me of someone I know:

I do not want to sound pedantic, but I would like to protest the absence of footnoted references to the works of most of the philosophers discussed. The authors provide footnoted references to some of their own works and a few others besides. There appears to be no system at all as to what does and does not get documented. Some of their interpretive and critical remarks about major thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Descartes, and Freud, and about various topics such as empiricism, and logicism, and substance, seem so wide of the mark as to require the evidence of actual books and pages to support them. Since Popper seems to be the star of the show, it would be nice to have the titles and pages of his works mentioned. After having been called to order on this matter by editors of my own work, I am shocked that Cambridge University Press has allowed this book to be published without insisting upon adequate documentation.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/