Doubt

Does the school destroy creativity by treating it as il treats other disciplines? To answer this question, this study shows how school culture tends to put everything in suspension (epoche), to filter everything through its system of values and to create a distance with concrete and complex experiences of life outside school. ln line with the philosophy of the research undertaken by the pragmatic movement, this study attempts to show that to actually change the beliefs and habits creativity must be driven by the search for solutions to real problems.
A survey undertaken with young creative designers in the multimedia sector supports these assumptions.

Verzweiflung und vom Glauben als Herausforderung bei Sören Kierkegaard  Zusammenfassung Während der platonische Sokrates auf die Macht der Dialektik zur mora li-schen Selbstbesinnung setzt, erfährt Kierkegaard das Denken von Jugend an zumal als unheimlich, insofern es alles bislang für wahr Gehaltene in Zweifel zu ziehen vermag. Dennoch kann sich Kierkegaard der Leidenschaft des Denkens nicht entziehen. Bald erkennt er, dass Zweifel leicht in Verzweif-lung umschlägt. Als einzigen Ausweg aus der Verzweiflung sieht er freilich den Glauben. Mit dem Glauben geht derweil die Affirmation der eigenen End-lichkeit einher und das ist der Schlüssel zum nicht verzweifelten Leben. Doch sollte die Versöhnung mit der eigenen Endlichkeit tatsächlich nur kraft des Glaubens möglich sein? Abstract Unlike Plato's Socrates, who relies on the power of dialectics for the benefit of moral self-reflection, Kierkegaard, while still young, experienced in particular the uncanny side of thinking-since everything can be called into question by skeptical thinking. Nonetheless, he could not resist the passion of thinking. Soon he recognized that doubt easily turns into desperation. Certainly , for Kierkegaard, there is no way out of desperation other than by faith. True faith implies the affirmation of one's finitude-and that is the key to the non-desperate life. But should the reconciliation with one's own fi-nitude really only be possible in virtue of faith?  Der vorliegende Aufsatz geht auf einen Vortrag vom 09.11.2016 an der Universität Fri

Comment peut-on croire à l’incroyable ? Il semble déraisonnable d’adhérer aux croyances les plus extrêmes, invraisemblables ou ubuesques. Il paraît tout aussi irrationnel qu’un adepte continue à croire fervemment alors que les faits sont en contradiction avec ses croyances. Cela soulève plusieurs mystères de la pensée humaine : les mécanismes de l’adhésion, la « résistance au changement » et la désadhésion à des croyances « invraisemblables ». Mais ces adeptes sont-ils aussi fous, crédules et malléables qu’ils y paraissent pour adhérer inconditionnellement à des croyances défiant les normes du vrai ?
Cette perméabilité ou imperméabilité de l’esprit face aux doutes, aux contradictions ou à l’intime conviction de la véracité des croyances les plus incroyables est ici disséquée aux prismes de la raison ou de la déraison de l’acteur social.

Table des matières

Introduction

Chapitre premier. — Approches théoriques des croyances

1. Le changement de croyances, de connaissance et de représentations
Festinger et l’échec d’une prophétie annoncée
Kuhn et le changement de connaissance
Psychologie sociale et dynamique des représentations sociales
La logique de Quine et le « système conceptuel »
Le paradigme pluridisciplinaire de la révision des croyances

2. Sectes et nouveaux mouvements religieux : apostasie ou manipulation mentale ?
Manipulation mentale, emprise et embrigadement sectaire
Adhésion et désadhésion au cœur de la sociologie des religions
Partisans de la manipulation mentale et sociologues des religions : les termes d’un débat animé

Chapitre 2. — Les mécanismes de l’adhésion

1. Les degrés de l’adhésion

2. Les premiers pas du futur adepte dans un mouvement marginal
Les acteurs de l’adhésion : les coapteurs
La « coaptation émotionnelle »
La « coaptation cognitive »

3. Les doutes et le scepticisme du futur adepte
Le scepticisme de l’adepte face aux croyances « invraisemblables »
L’expérience de Asch et la « force du grand nombre »

4. La croyance à l’épreuve ou l’administration profane de la preuve
La preuve médiatisée
La preuve expérientielle

5. Confiance et croyance
La confiance a posteriori : la croyance précède la confiance
La confiance a priori : la confiance précède la croyance

6. Portrait des adeptes convaincus
Quelques idées reçues
Niveau, genre et temporalité
Typologie des adeptes convaincus et types d’adhésion
Les objets de l’adhésion

Chapitre 3. — De la « résistance au changement de croyances » à la rupture d’adhésion

1. La logique contre intuitive des croyances
Le prisme de l’observateur extérieur : déraison de croire
Contradiction factuelle : du prisme de l’adepte aux raisons de croire
Le morcellement des croyances expérientielles

2. De la fluctuation à la rupture d’adhésion
Doutes et temporalité
Les fluctuations de l’adhésion
Basculer vers la rupture : valeurs et contradiction axiologique en action

3. Les phases de la désadhésion : un changement de « cadre cognitif »
La phase d’adhésion partielle
La phase d’adhésion inconditionnelle
La phase d’effritement partiel
La phase d'ouverture épistémique : un pas décisif vers la rupture

4. Les croyances laissées en suspens : de la rupture à la réadhésion
La rupture provoquée ou l’intervention familiale
Un doute omniprésent
Appartenir à un nouveau mouvement après la sortie

In Faith After Doubt, Brian McLaren formulates doubt as a means to enhance and enrich religious faith. In progressive fashion, doubt is reclaimed as a means to develop faith, such that believers can aim towards a greater solidarity with others and practice revolutionary love. By providing a nuanced analysis of faith, McLaren takes a phased approach where believers experience increased levels of wisdom and spiritual depth as they engage in different levels of doubt. This text may offer assistance to those who have been discouraged and fearful of entertaining doubt in their spiritual lives. Through invoking a healthy skepticism of inherited doctrines passed down by dogmatic Christianity, individuals are provided a means to further develop their faith as opposed to becoming disjointed from it. Much of this text constructs a progressive future for Christianity in an effort to ensure its relevance and continued survival. Beyond the complex analysis given to faith and doubt in this work, it is lacking a robust means to ensure that Christians will enact the revolutionary love McLaren aims to achieve. To impart such a vision of love requires practicing radical hospitality towards the most vulnerable, and believers cannot remain complicit to a toxic form of orthodoxy. Pursuing social justice aims necessitates an activist faith that critically probes dogmatic theology; and by making allowances for the faith commitments of all believers irrespective of consequence, this project remains a tepid means to further a truly progressive evolution of Christianity.

This is a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello (1603) as an intellectual play about the ambiguities of self-knowledge. While acknowledging the influence of philosophical scepticism, exemplified primarily by the character of Iago, the chapter focuses on the non-sceptical characters’ fear of doubt as well as on the discord between their beliefs and Iago’s incredulity. A twofold understanding of fear of doubt is proposed: Its passive aspect, exhibited by the female characters in the play, involves radical suppression of doubt before it has reached conscious awareness; the active aspect of fear of doubt, epitomized by the character of Othello, can be described as the inability to tolerate disbelief and uncertainty and the need for a radical resolution. This approach to the play reveals some of the principles behind its paradoxical plausibility and elucidates the differences in its reception as a text and as a theatrical performance.

Key Words: Scepticism, doubt, tolerance of uncertainty, paradoxical plausibility, love, jealousy, Shakespeare, Othello.

In: Framing Fear, Horror and Terror through the Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Joseph Campos II and Kornelia Boczkowska. Oxford, United Kingdom: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2016, pp. 39-64. ISBN 978-1-84888-333-8.

Can science tell us what’s objectively true? Or is it merely a clever way to cure doubt – to give us something to believe in, whether it’s true or not? In this essay, I look at the pragmatist account of science expounded by Charles Sanders Peirce in his 1877 essay, ‘The Fixation of Belief’. Against Peirce, I argue that science does not come naturally to our species, nor does the doubting open-mindedness upon which its practice relies. To the extent that science is successful in ‘curing’ doubt, it’s because it tracks the real state of the world; and I argue that Peirce himself – his pragmatist narrative notwithstanding – is implicitly committed to this view as well.

A review of Dan Barker's tome, godless, how an evangelical pastor abandoned fundamentalist faith and embraced so-called New Atheism. Mr. Barker is now codirector of Freedom From Religion Foundation. Barker's justifiable excoriation of his evangelical easy believism seems trite on the surface, but for him it was critical, life changing. How religious experience is not reliable and there is even in the most sincere theist experience a vacuum for something bigger than a movement, a belief, a faith even in the resurrected Christ. I read and reviewed this during my own period of agnostic experience, weary from the divisions in Christianity. From whence I rose, returned, and re-embraced "the Church of the firstborn... the pillar and foundation of the truth." I found my doubts embraced by love. In my own experience, as many Evangelicals who have not experienced Christian orthodoxy in its historic expression, we have only our experience from which to judge something entirely mysterious as the Church revealed from God who gives the Bible its authority. Bible fundamentalism was not enough to keep Barker and it almost lost me to skeptical agnosticism. Individual liberty from religion may be the epitome of Barker's New Atheism, while for me Orthodox Christianity is the epitome of life in Christ.

There is a frame of mind without which any discussion of individual points of Islamic doctrine or law risks running aground just as it sets sail: it is the conviction that the task for today's Muslims is not only to apply the right answers but also, and above all, to find those very answers. This spirit of inquiry was indeed a major feature of the first Abbasid era and is lively expressed in some famous pages by al-Ǧāḥiẓ and al-Ġazālī.

Note: the translation of al-Ǧāḥiẓ is my own, for al-Ġazālī I have followed Farid Jabre.

It is by now well known that ancient Pyrrhonism was intended to be a way of life rather than a doctrine. Various objections to Pyrrhonism as a way of life have been raised—that it is psychologically impossible and that it makes life grind to a halt. While there are answers to those objections, I’ll argue that there are aspects of Pyrrhonism that make it nonetheless an unappealing way of life and unsuitable in modern circumstances. One crucial change from ancient times is that the Greek skeptics found themselves puzzled by disagreement, while modern philosophers have been worried by doubt. This helps to explain why skepticism is now seen as a challenge to be overcome rather than as a possible way of life. I argue, however, that a deeper understanding of the nature of doubt and its relation to knowledge will allow us to move past the current stalemate between skeptical and anti-skeptical arguments, recover a more accurate history of epistemology, and identify the best sort of epistemic lives available to us. In particular, I argue that a life lived in accordance with a Neo-Academic form of skepticism is more attractive than one guided by dogmatism.

The goal of this article is twofold. First, it revises the historiographic partition proposed by John Deely in Four Ages of Understanding (2001) by arguing that the moment marking the beginning of philosophical Modernity has been vividly recorded in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy with the experiment with the wax. Second, an upshot of this historical study is that it helps make sense of Deely’s somewhat iconoclastic use of the words “subject” and “subjectivity” to designate mind-independent worldly things. The hope is that successfully accomplishing these twin tasks will give semiotic inquiry a better appreciation of its own history, as well as resources genial to furthering its ongoing development.

Paper regarding the idea of "religious tolerance" as propaganda designed to just let religion continue to do harm to society and destroy lives. See my paper 'Religion Is Not Benign' in order to better understand this paper:
http://www.academia.edu/11700742/Religion_Is_Not_Benign

Mémoire de Master 2 Recherche en Histoire Médiévale ayant obtenu la note de 19.5/20.

Ce mémoire s'inscrit comme la finalité d'une réflexion menée pendant deux ans autour des phénomènes d'incrédulité réunis et désignés ici sous le terme de "doute religieux". Le terme de "doute" employé pourrait laisser croire à une étude sur le dubito des théologiens médiévaux. Il n'en est rien. Au contraire, il est question d'aborder ici les croyances et incroyances des hommes et femmes "simples" du Moyen Age.
En se basant sur des sources inquisitoriales et prédicatives provenant de différentes régions de l'Europe Occidentale, le but de ce travail fut d'identifier puis de tenter expliquer les incrédulités les plus fréquemment rencontrées.

This paper explicates the notion of doubt and the relationship of doubt to belief and conviction. It distinguishes three types of political virtue-leadership, systemic, and corrective-and considers whether doubt is a political virtue in any of these three senses. It is argued that while doubt is not a leadership virtue, it is a systemic and a corrective virtue.

In contemporary England, amateur paranormal investigators actively seek empirical evidence of the paranormal. These investigators are self-fashioned experts who aim to balance scientific and spiritual perspectives in hopes of researching the existence of ghosts from an objective perspective. Despite actively seeking out ghosts and amassing firsthand paranormal experiences, investigators remain deeply doubtful about the nature of their evidence and the existence of the paranormal. Here, I explore the production and experience of doubt by examining paranormal investigators' struggles to define and quantify the paranormal. Competing ideas about the substance or nature of ghosts lie at the heart of this struggle. Paranormal investigators agree that collecting and analyzing electromagnetic energy offers the most promising pathway for establishing empirical evidence of the paranormal. However, there is analytic uncertainty regarding the meaning of electromagnetic energy: it might indicate a spiritual or natural presence. Here, I argue that these two competing frames of interpretation engender and sustain states of doubt among investigators; however, paradoxically, these very states of doubt allow them to maintain and sustain embodied encounters with the very paranormal forces they doubt.

Ernest Sosa’s virtue perspectivism can be thought of as an attempt to capture as much as possible of the Cartesian project in epistemology while remaining within the framework of externalist fallibilism. I argue (a) that Descartes’s project was motivated by a desire for intellectual stability and (b) that his project does not suffer from epistemic circularity. By contrast, Sosa’s epistemology does entail epistemic circularity and, for this reason, proves unable to secure the sort of intellectual stability Descartes wanted. I then argue that this leaves Sosa’s epistemology vulnerable to an important kind of skepticism.

Doxastic voluntarism maintains that we have voluntary control over our beliefs. It is generally denied by contemporary philosophers. I argue that doxastic voluntarism is true: normally, and insofar as we are rational, we are able to suspend belief and, provided we have a natural inclination to believe, we are able to rescind that suspension, and thus to choose to believe. I show that the arguments that have been offered against doxastic voluntarism fail; and that, if the denial of doxastic voluntarism is part of a strategy to defeat scepticism, it is inept, because knowledge presupposes doubt.

This paper will attempt to explore the place of doubt in testimony. Or put another way, how can we faithfully express seasons of doubt, areas of darkness and unresolved “issues” in the Pentecostal practice of testimony. For whether it is finished work, or Christian perfection - the space for unresolved portions of testimony are often not given.This paper hopes to offer another perspective out of history rather than Scriptural basis, as we will look at John Wesley’s own writings of his journey of doubt, assurance and testimony.

This study is concerned with investigating the uncertainty experienced by a painter during the art-making process and how this uncertainty might be indexed by visual ambiguity. I argue that moments of visual ambiguity identified within selected paintings occur as a result of their being “the physical manifestation of a cause”, and thus become a trace of that cause (Krauss 1977:59).

Dans l'un de ses derniers recueils de notes, De la certitude, Wittgenstein s'interroge, à la suite de Moore, sur l'étendue de notre savoir et sur la distinction conceptuelle entre savoir et certitude. L'approche grammaticale marque une rupture avec le traitement classique de ce problème philosophique : c'est le sens des attributions de savoir - et corrélativement des expressions de doute - que Wittgenstein questionne. Le recours à des jeux de langage ordinaires et fictifs permet de décrire et de clarifier les usages de « savoir », de « croire » et d'« être certain ». Il en découle une conception anti-intellectualiste de la certitude aux antipodes de celle, inaugurale, de Descartes : Wittgenstein nous exerce à concevoir une certitude qui n'est plus appréhendée dans les termes de l'évidence, mais résolument immanente à nos pratiques.

Cognitive Bubbles and Firewalls: Epistemic Immunizations in Human Reasoning Lorenzo Magnani (lmagnani@unipv.it) Department of Philosophy, University of Pavia, Piazza Botta 6, 27100 Pavia, ITALY Tommaso Bertolotti (tommaso.bertolotti@unipv.it) Department of Philosophy, University of Pavia, Piazza Botta 6, 27100 Pavia, ITALY Abstract John Woods defined the epistemic bubble as the inescapable state of first-person human rationality. In this paper we will propose, at a seminal level, how the fertility of such approach can be expanded beyond the logical-epistemic dimension: the emotional sphere as well seems to be deeply affected by self- immunization dynamics so that the cognitive bubble – rather than just epistemic – could define a characteristic framework of human cognition. Keywords: Cognitive bubbles; immunization; doubt; emo- tions; religion; abduction. Introduction Different fields of human reasoning are characterized by what could be roughly indicated as epistemic or cognitive im...

Religious and secular convictions have powerful effects, but their foundations are often surprisingly fragile. New converts often come across as stringent believers precisely because they need to dispel their own lingering doubts, while revolutionary movements survive only through the denial of ambiguity. This book shows that a focus on uncertainty and doubt is indispensable for grasping the role of ideas in social action. By studying everyday doubt, this book unravels the mechanisms by which convictions gain and lose their force, and analyses the dynamics that propel loosely held ideas into committed action. Drawing on a wide range of cases, from spirit mediums in Taiwan to Maoist revolutionaries in India, and from Old Believers in Romania to ethnic strife in Central Asia, the authors analyse the ways in which doubt is overcome and, conversely, how belief systems collapse. In doing so, Ethnographies of Doubt provides important insights into the cycles of faith, hope, conviction and disillusion that are intrinsic to the human condition.

The phenomenon of doubt (hesitation) in pre-Islamic (Jaheli) poetry is usually accompanied with plagiarism (Entehal). Plagiary is not limited to any special nation; rather, it is widespread. In literary works of many nations. Mohammad Ibn-e-sallam Aljomahi and Abdolmalik Ibn-e- Hesham are among the most prominent critics of plagiary. Also , Morgolious, one of the greatest orientalists, has criticized this issue and branched the reasons for it into two categories: external and internal reasons.
Mostafa sadeq Al-Rafei is among the first contemporary Arabs who took this issue into consideration. Then Dr. Taha Hossein in his book “The per-islamic poetry” discussed this issue. In the revised edition of his book titled “ pre-islamic literature “Dr Taha Hossein pointed out that “what we call pre-islamic literature is not actually pre-islamic, rather it has been concocted in Islamic era and attributed to pre-islamic (Jaheli) period”. He also believes that “the poetry in this period dose not illustrate the religious, political, economic, and social life of people and that in the pre-islamic poetry, the two famous languages of the peninsula, Adnanis and qahtanis have not been used”. not long after the publication of this book, it was faced with lots of criticism and following that many books appeared criticizing his ideas, some in an exagerated way and some with a fair Judgement.

This paper offers a philosophical outlook on the subject of the communication of certainty and uncertainty, by focusing on the later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s image of “hinges”. Hinges are basic common sense certainties which ordinarily “go without saying”. In a sense, they even require not to be said. Lingering over the debate on the ineffability of hinges which is at the core of the Wittgensteinian secondary literature, but also hinting at some studies in psychopathology, the paper argues that in extraordinary contexts to assert explicitly a hinge-certainty is possible and may be important, while in ordinary contexts certainty can only be communicated through silence: when a certainty which “goes without saying” is explicitly said, the situation paradoxically results in uncertainty.

Mit dem Begriff der moralischen Gewissheit wird im kirchlichen Recht die richterliche Überzeugung in einem Strafverfahren bezeichnet, dass eine Angeklagte bzw. ein Angeklagter schuldig sei, gleichermaßen die sich im Zivilverfahren einstellende Einsicht des Gerichts, dass ein von einer Partei gerichtlich geltend gemachter Anspruch berechtigt sei. Moralische Gewissheit wird heute als typisch katholischer Beweisstandard aufgefasst.  Historisch jedoch beschränkte er sich nicht auf die katholische Jurisprudenz, sondern fand ebenso in weltlichen Gerichtsverfahren Verwendung. Das weltliche Beweisrecht ließ die „moralische Gewissheit“ terminologisch allerdings weitgehend hinter sich. Stattdessen wird kontinentaleuropäisch gegenwärtig die auf der Basis der freien Beweiswürdigung gewonnene richterliche Überzeugung hervorgehoben, im angloamerikanischen Verfahrensrecht kommt in den Strafverfahren der zweifelsfreie Nachweis der Schuld („beyond a reasonable doubt“), in Zivilsachen zumeist das Überwiegen der Wahrscheinlichkeit („preponderance of evidence“) oder ein eindeutiger Nachweis der Sache („clear and convincing evidence“) zum Einsatz.
Moralische Gewissheit gilt daher nun als katholisches Sondergut. Doch wie eigen und einzigartig ist der Beweisstandard? Bezeichnet moralische Gewissheit einen anderen Grad der richterlichen Überzeugung vom Sosein eines Sachverhalts oder handelt es sich allein um eine terminologische Alleinstellung, die sich auf die Überzeugungsbildung selbst nicht auswirkt? Ein Vergleich der in weltlichen und kirchlichen Verfahren genutzten Beweisstandards hilft bei der Klärung, ob moralische Gewissheit einen eigenen Standard oder ausschließlich eine terminologische Varietät der in weltlichen Verfahren genutzten Pendants darstellt. Zu diesem Zweck erhebt der vorliegende Beitrag zunächst die grundsätzliche Funktion von Beweisstandards (1). Ein kurzer historischer Rückblick hilft zu verstehen, aus welchem Grund sie entstanden und wie sich ihre Funktion bis in die Gegenwart weiterentwickelte. Alsdann ist die kirchenrechtliche Bedeutung der moralischen Gewissheit darzulegen und sie mit den in weltlichen Verfahren üblichen Standards zu vergleichen (2). Im Fazit wird erwogen, inwieweit das kirchliche Festhalten an der moralischen Gewissheit zur Diskussion gestellt werden sollte (3).

Clear and distinct perception is the centrepiece of Descartes’s philosophy — it is the source of all certainty — but what does he mean by ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’? According to the prevailing approach, what it means for a perception to be clear is that its content has a certain objective property, like truth. I argue instead that clarity is at least partly a subjective, phenomenal quality whereby a content is presented as true to the perceiving subject. Clarity comes in degrees. Any weak degree of clarity, available to the senses, can be merely subjective, since what it presents as true may not actually be true. But complete clarity, available to intellectual perception, has an objective dimension, since what it presents as true is always some truth, some bit of reality. Further, I argue that the other perceptual qualities that Descartes identifies — obscurity, confusion, and distinctness — are all defined in terms of clarity. Of particular note is the fact that distinctness is not a positive feature to be added to clarity: a distinct perception is just a completely clear perception.

Wittgenstein likens philosophy both to an illness and to a therapy. The reflections he dedicates to mental disturbance in On Certainty  shed some light on this ambivalence, by pointing at the intertwined themes of common sense, doubt, mistake, reasonableness, and normality. Wittgenstein’s remarks have sometimes been compared to the description of the symptoms of what psychopathologists have called the loss of natural self-evidence, or the loss of common sense. Besides briefly recalling some of the outcomes of this debate in literature, I focus on Wittgenstein’s conception of “hinges”, the basic practical certainties which patients suffering from the loss of common sense seem to lack. By working on this comparison, I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophy that clarifies both its insane and its therapeutic side.

Peirce makes it clear that doubt and belief oppose one another. But that slogan admits of a weaker and a stronger reading. The weaker reading permits and the stronger reading forbids the possibility that one can be in a state of doubt and of belief with respect to the same proposition at the same time. The stronger claim is standardly attributed to Peirce, for textual and philosophical reasons. This paper maintains that this standard construal is excessively strong. It argues that the secondary literature tends to presuppose the strong reading and that it often does so by confusing sufficient conditions for belief with necessary ones. It acknowledges some textual evidence on behalf of the strong reading but maintains that the relevant passages are as friendly to the weak as to the strong interpretation of Peirce. The paper then links the doubt-belief theory of “The Fixation of Belief” to the papers on probability that occupy the bulk of the Illustrations of the Logic of Science. It shows that Peirce’s discussion of probability, strength of belief, and weight of evidence makes room for confidence, but not belief, to be undermined and thus offers a more flexible version of Peirce’s theory of inquiry.

One curious aspect of Stanley Cavell’s investigations into skepticism is his relative neglect of one of philosophy’s most important skeptics, David Hume. Cavell’s thinking about skepticism is located in relation to Wittgenstein, Kant, Emerson, Austin, and others.  But while Hume is occasionally mentioned, those encounters are brief and generally dismissive. In “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” for example, Cavell remarks that while "Hume is always a respectable place to begin,” Kant is “deeper and obscurer.” I think this assessment of Hume to be a mistake on Cavell et alia’s part, as I think there are important and helpful resources to be culled from le bon David for those of us working through the constellation of topics Cavell has done so much to clarify and to confront. In this essay I work to go some distance towards both remedying the neglect of Hume in Cavell studies. In particular, I compare and contrast Hume and Cavell along two axes central to each of their thoughts about skepticism: (1) the naturalness (and unnaturalness) of skeptical doubt and (2) the recovery or attainment of the ordinary in the wake of skeptical doubt.

Nous nous proposons dans le présent article de revenir sur l’enjeu de Über Gewissheit : doit-on lire cet ensemble de notes comme l’ultime réponse de Wittgenstein à l’idéalisme sceptique ou comme la réélaboration de nos catégories de connaissance (croire, savoir, être certain)? La réponse à cette question passe tout d’abord par la prise en compte du dialogue avec Moore et en particulier par une réévaluation de sa défense du sens commun et de sa preuve du monde extérieur aussi célèbre que controversée. Nous soulignons les limites d’une interprétation purement dogmatique de ces textes en mettant en évidence le caractère problématique du dogmatisme mooréen, avant de revenir sur les deux critiques que Malcolm puis Wittgenstein en ont proposées. Un bref rappel de la critique de Malcolm nous permet ensuite de saisir la singularité de la démarche de Wittgenstein qui consiste par l’analyse grammaticale des propositions "intéressantes" de Moore à renvoyer dos à dos les prétentions au savoir de Moore et les doutes sceptiques.

In this article, we propose a reconsideration of the Über Gewissheit issue: should this collection of notes be read as Wittgenstein’s final response to sceptical idealism or as a re-elaboration of the categories of knowledge (to believe, to know, to be certain) ? The response to this question will first take into account the dialogue with Moore, and will re-evalutate his well-known and controversial defence of common sense and proof of the external world. Before going on to consider the two critiques proposed by Malcolm, then Wittgenstein, we will underline the limitations of a purely dogmatic interpretation of these texts by highlighting the problematical nature of Moore’s dogmatism. A short reminder of Malcolm’s critique will then enable us to grasp the singularity of Wittgenstein’s approach. By way of a grammatical analysis of Moore’s «interesting» propositions, Witt- genstein dismisses both Moore’s claims to knowledge and the sceptic’s doubts.

Generally, an epistemic fallibilist considers it reasonable to claim, “I know that P, but I may be wrong.” An epistemic infallibilist, on the other hand, would consider this claim absurd. I argue initially that infallibilism presents more advantages in its assertion of the claim’s absurdity than fallibilism does in making the claim. One, infallibilism is not faulted with the propensity for violations of epistemic closure that beleaguers some fallibilist accounts, due in part to the latter’s problematic shunting of fallible epistemic standards across inferential chains. Two, infallibilism is more easily modelled doxastically than fallibilism, as the former’s understanding of certainty is more tractable than the latter’s idea of what counts as a viable standard of fallibility. A rectification of these fallibilist issues may then be called upon to motivate gradualist variants of fallibilism. For epistemic gradualism, the problematic modellability and shunting of standards is curtailed via an awareness that the standard for knowledge is just one out of many along a gradient that includes, at one extreme, the infallibilist standard of certainty. Specifically, first, gradualism, along with infallibilism, can be modelled doxastically through elucidating upon an obtaining relation between doubt and knowledge; next, the problem with violating closure, although not generally applicable to infallibilism, can be answered by gradualism with a reasonable denial of closure altogether that makes precise which epistemic standard is relevant for which part of an inferential chain; lastly, these modelling resources can be appropriated, by both gradualism and infallibilism, to successfully address a doxastically pertinent form of closure violation called rational self-doubt.

Ambivalence (as in practical conflicts, moral dilemmas, conflicting beliefs, and mixed feelings) is a central phenomenon of human life. Yet ambivalence is incompatible with entrenched philosophical conceptions of personhood, judgement, and action, and is denied or marginalised by thinkers of diverse concerns. This book takes a radical new stance, bringing the study of core philosophical issues together with that of ambivalence. The book proposes new accounts in several areas – including subjectivity, consciousness, rationality, and value – while elucidating a wide range of phenomena expressive of ambivalence, from emotional ambivalence to self-deception. The book rejects the view that ambivalence makes a person divided, showing that our tension-fraught attitudes are profoundly unitary. Ambivalence is not tantamount to confusion or to paralysis: it is always basically rational, and often creative, active, and perceptive as well. The book develops themes from Wittgenstein, Davidson, Sartre, and Freud. It engages with contemporary debates in Analytic Philosophy in addition to work ranging from Aristotle to Cultural Studies and Empirical Psychology, and considers a rich set of examples from daily life and literature.