This is a course about the history of Skepticism from the ancient Greeks to today, with special attention to the political ramifications of questioning man's ability to know the world and himself with any certainty. We will discuss the debates raging between Plato and the Sophists, the rise of Christianity in the Roman world, and the so-called 'Skeptical Crisis' of the Renaissance as well as Pierre Bayle's Skepticism and David Hume's. In addition the Natural Law tradition will be explored and the relationship between Skepticism and Conservatism. In the second part, we will explore the systematic relations between Skepticism and politics. What is skeptical doubt? When is doubt relevant? How does Skepticism relate to tolerance and to freedom of expression? And can it help us to solve political problems not only in a critical, but also in a creative way?
Skepticism and Conservatism
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Del curso dictado por Erasmus University Rotterdam
The Politics of Skepticism
14 calificaciones
De la lección
Skepticism and Conservatism
We will focus on the intimate relationship between Skepticism and the origins of eighteenth-century conservatism: Edmund Burke's analysis of the French Revolution will be put into perspective. But we will also pay attention to the way in which Skepticism came to serve as a progressive and liberating force, for instance in its critique of biblical authority.
Conoce a los instructores
Wiep van BungeProf. dr.
Faculty of Philosophy
Tim De MeyDr.
Faculty of Philosophy
This is Corpus Christi College Oxford.
These are the grounds of Corpus Christi College.
This is Christ Church.
This college was established in the early 16th century very much on
the basis of Erasmus' ideas on what a proper education should look like.
It is one of the smaller colleges,
the place where famous philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin
and Thomas Nagel took their bachelor.
At least from the Renaissance onward,
the skeptical tradition despite the anxieties it may have provoked
among the authorities contained an essentially conservative element.
Just consider the example set by Pierre Charron, Montaigne's pupil.
In the face of religious and political diversity,
he preferred to accommodate to public opinion rather than run unnecessary risks.
To Charron, this attitude presented the height of wisdom.
But in a very real sense the term conservative makes little sense
prior to the 18th century when it starts to acquire it's modern meaning,
in particular, as we shall see in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
It would seem the electoral profile of
conservatism started to take shape in the course of
the 18th century when the contours became visible of the so-called counter enlightenment.
Over the past few years,
much has been written about all sorts of varieties of enlightenment thought.
Besides a huge variety of different national enlightened cultures,
most experts today have come to distinguish
between a moderate and a radical enlightenment.
Although it's not always clear which philosophers belong to which wing.
Darrin McMahan has recently added yet another concept to the equation
when he launched his book on the French enemies of the Enlightenment.
As he has brilliantly demonstrated,
these authors were the first to identify the party of
the enlightment as a group of [inaudible] sharing a common intellectual agenda.
Indeed, by profiling its membership, they contribute to no small degree to
the budding self-assessments of the [inaudible] as an intellectual movement,
carrying the torch of enlightenment.
But again, the labels we use in order to get some grip
on the history of philosophy often turn out to be pretty treacherous.
Consider the case of Hume.
No one would care to question the radical nature of his theory of knowledge.
The consequences of his empiricism were
devastating and they were evidently meant to be so.
His reduction of meaningful propositions either to the domain of relations of ideas
or to matters of fact revealed pretentious disciplines
such as metaphysics and theology to be empty.
By further demonstrating that the full signs of nature was based on
assumptions that could neither be perceived nor be proven to be correct.
He pushed skepticism all the way.
By the same token, Hume's insistence on
the inevitability of following customs and habits,
for instance, when it comes to the assumption that nature does not change,
appears to have fostered a conservative attitude.
Despite the ferocity of his onslaught on theology,
he is rarely considered to belong to the radical enlightenment.
Although Hume was in favor, for instance,
of independence of the American colonies,
he was hardly known for his revolutionary political views.
Conservatism only appears to have come into its own without many books,
Reflections on the French Revolution,
written within months of the storming of the Bastile in July 1789.
Edmund Burke was an Anglo Irish politician, a man of letters,
who knew France well and who at a very early stage of
the French Revolution wrote an extremely influential pamphlet condemning its cause.
Well before the terror struck, Burke was deeply
worried and especially upset about the way in which in some cultures,
the French Revolution was compared to the Glorious Revolution of 1689.
In Burke's case, the connection between his skepticism and
his rejection of revolutionary societal reforms was obvious.
According to Burke, it was simply ludicrous to arrest the King, and worse,
the Queen of France who he appears to have revered in the name of
anti-concept such as freedom, equality, and humanity.
In Burke's view, such lofty notions are nothing but words.
Burke to be more precise, was very impressed with George Barkley's attack on
the notion that there are such things as abstract ideas.
According to Burke, societies are not machines that can be designed and built,
they are organic holes which become what they are by their specific history.
This history is held together by particular customs
and habits which can be described and analyzed
but which cannot be implemented or changed without running serious risks.
The most fundamental mistake revolutionaries make,
or so Burke seems to have felt, is to believe that politics is about rights.
In his view, all talk about rights is merely abstract and perfectly idol.
Politics is about power and the art of politics
consists in finding a balance of power within society,
according to which, the different sections of society exercised their own rights.
Human rights are perfectly fictitious as there is no such thing as humanity.
Typical for Burke's skeptical conservatism is his insistence on
the essential difference between the Glorious Revolution of
1689 in Britain and the French Revolution.
To Burke's mind, the Glorious Revolution,
the Catholic King James the Second was
replaced by the Protestant Dutchman William the Third,
was justified and hugely successful precisely because it was a conservative revolution.
It was a conservative revolution as it re-established ancient liberties.
It had prevented a further spreading of monarchical power in
the country not used to absolute claims to power made by kings.
In short, the Glorious Revolution had prevented Britain from turning into another France.
In Burke's view, the struggle over
sovereignty in Britain went back at least to Magna Carta,
a charter agreed on by King John of England and his subjects in 1215.
In Burke's view there was a direct connection between 1215 and 1689.
That is to say, the Bill of Rights.
In both constitutions, the King was forced to respect
the hereditary rights of his barons and of his people.
Indeed, to this day English liberty is still
considered by some a response to the Norman invasion of
1066 when French speaking elites came to
replace the indigenous Saxons who were essentially Germans.
Ever since the mid 15th century recovery of Tacitus' Ghahramani,
this text about the barbarous but freedom loving inhabitants
of Northern Europe has imbued Scollard with this curious idea
that if anything the Germans cherish their native freedom.
Today, however, the experts have grown very skeptical indeed about
the Germanic backgrounds of Anglo-Saxon Britain.
Myths of origin are no longer as popular as they once were.
Hume's essay that politics may be reduced to
assigns is one of Hume's lesser known pieces.
Now we have two questions on this particular text.
What is the purpose of Hume's historical digressions?
And second, identify at least one highly problematical assumption to this essay.
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