Some Background

My interest in skepticism emerged from asking questions about the nature of philosophy itself, how it differs from and relates to other knowledge- or wisdom-seeking traditions. I began to suspect that the key to understanding philosophy, both as a body of existing work and as an ongoing activity, lay in understanding its susceptibility to certain kinds of skeptical undermining. Only later did I become convinced that commanding a clear view of the philosophical impulse and its skeptical shadow reveals something of fundamental significance about the human condition, namely, how we strain against our own limitations in our perennial striving after transcendence.

It is here that I find important and mutually illuminating similarities among philosophy, religion, and the natural sciences. In my view, the Hellenistic ideal of philosophy as a way of life amounts, for skeptics, to finding a way to live at peace with the unresolved tension between our perceived finitude and its conceptual precondition, the idea of the infinite, absolute, or unconditioned. The skeptical way of life advocates suspension of judgment and continued openness to fundamental inquiries as a salve against the ambiguities of philosophy, the clashing dogmatisms of religion, and the Weberian ‘disenchantment’ of the natural sciences.