Putting Skeptics in Their Place vs. Stopping Them in Their Tracks: Two Anti-skeptical Strategies 0. Introduction: Putting Skeptics in Their Place vs. Stopping Them in Their Tracks

For reasons that I hope will soon become clear, I would like to begin this paper with somewhat irresponsibly entertaining the idea that my esteemed friend and colleague, John Greco, is a philosophical descendant of John Buridan, via the Scottish common sense philosopher Thomas Reid and his Cambridge-descendant, G. E. Moore. In these musings, I will confine myself to establishing a sufficiently intriguing family resemblance, without exploring the historically more intriguing actual genealogical ties (although John Greco himself quite conveniently pointed out the important connections between Moore’s, Reid’s and his own epistemology). But in this paper I will rather be after certain philosophically intriguing connections, for which showing the family resemblance of their characteristic principles, methods, and conclusions will suffice. As I will try to show, given their common, typical approach, these philosophers are all committed to handling skeptics, as John Greco put it, by “putting them in their place”. I believe that the philosophical importance of this approach is that it is justified, and works in its own way, only after already significant concessions have been made to the skeptics. After all, you need to put them in their place, only if they are already cavorting all over the place. But, as I will also try show, this approach of “putting skeptics in their place”, could in principle be replaced by a much more effective policy of “stopping them in their tracks” in the first place. In fact, I will argue that the “putting-them-in-their-place” policy historically became necessitated only after the (mostly implicit) “stopping-them-in-theirtracks” policy came to be discarded, on account of the allegedly unacceptable ontological commitments it carried.