Epistemic Angst, Intellectual Courage and Radical Scepticism

Epistemic Courage and Epistemic Virtue

Wittgensteinian Anti-Scepticism and Epistemic Vertigo

We offer an overview of what we take to be the main themes in Annalisa Coliva’s book,Moore and Wittgenstein: Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense. In particular, we focus on the ‘framework reading’ that she offers of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and its anti-sceptical implications. While broadly agreeing with the proposal that Coliva puts forward on this score, we do suggest one important supp...

Angst and the amygdala

Fear is an adaptation to danger, but excessive fear underlies diverse forms of mental anguish and pathology. One neural site linked to a sense of adversity is the amygdala, and one neuropeptide, corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), is localized within the central nucleus of the amygdala. Glucocorticoids enhance the production of CRH in this region of the brain, resulting in increased attentio...

Experts, truth and scepticism

We scientists have a dilemma. We are experts in our area of research, but our job demands that we constantly remain sceptical of our latest results even when we deeply believe we have unfolded new layers of truth. This is the world of science and, for the most part, we accept its contradictions. For those on the outside, however, this creates a problem of whom to believe. When a scientist is ca...

Scepticism and Justification

The study of scepticism might be said to define epistemology. As the enquiry into the nature and sources of knowledge, epistemology's two fold concern is to identify and explicate the conditions whose satisfaction will amount to knowledge. Familiarly, one of these crucial conditions is justification. The problems facing the justification of knowledge-claims can best and most powerfully be descr...