Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone [Hardcover]

Richard H. Popkin (Author), Avrum Stroll (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2002

Popkin and Stroll review each major theory of philosophy chronologically, and then further organise these theories into their respective subject areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Within each subject area, the authors discuss how the sceptical challenge gave rise to new philosophical positions. The volume concludes with an especially interesting debate between the authors on the merits of scepticism today. Stroll thinks that, ultimately, the doubts expressed by sceptics can be refuted, while Popkin denies this. This is an outstanding introduction to the problems of philosophy by two eminent philosophers with a gift for presenting the history of ideas in a very enjoyable fashion.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone is a deliberate recounting of skepticism's role in the development of philosophy. Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll contend that the history of philosophy has been propelled largely by skepticism, or more precisely, responses to skepticism. They distinguish between everyday skepticism, defined as skepticism about facts, and philosophical skepticism, the sort of thoroughgoing skepticism that denies we know anything at all. It is the latter kind of skepticism that, in their view, has driven Western thought.

As the title implies, Popkin and Stroll's account of skepticism is indeed suited for lay readers or students, but the concepts are rendered so simply as to court reductionism. The book is readable but methodical and tends to omit detail. They sketch a modest historical account of skepticism's role in philosophy, hitting the high points in summary fashion before tackling skepticism topically, doing a chapter each on the philosophy of religion, ethics, and political philosophy. The final chapter is a debate between Popkin and Avrum about skepticism's defensibility, wrangling over whether "skepticism can raise probing criticisms without being correct in itself." --Eric de Place

From Library Journal

This clearly written book introduces philosophy by presenting a variety of philosophical theories and skeptical challenges to each. After an introductory chapter explaining the nature of a philosophical problem and distinguishing two kinds of skepticism, Popkin and Stroll discuss theories drawn from six areas of philosophy: epistemology, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. The authors of the theories are Plato, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, among others. The final chapter is a pair of letters in which one author criticizes skepticism and the other defends it. Highly recommended as a first philosophy book and for college collections and large public libraries. Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 342 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (January 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573929360
• ISBN-13: 978-1573929363
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,020,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unusually accessible philosophy book, April 26, 2002

By 

"leochait" (Pacific Palisades, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone (Hardcover)

Popkin and Stroll, using skepticism as a springboard, have written an insightful, informal introduction to philosophy. The book is clear and readable but not superficial. In a neutral way, the authors review how all great thinkers from the Greeks to the contemporary have dealt with theories about our ability to know anything.
The work is structured in three parts: The first defines skepticism and deals with different philosophers. The second applies various philosophical principles to the study of religion, ethics and politics. The third is a debate between the authors, one of them is a skeptic. I heartily recommend this book to the general public.

0 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Horse feathers meet feather horses, June 26, 2003

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone (Hardcover)

I thought I might be able to learn something from a book which takes a vast overview of philosophical problems, illustrated by concrete examples, but I did not get very far into this book. Is it so typical that philosophers are so high up in their ivory tower that their hypothetical situations lack any substance?

This book has no idea how often it is wrong about fundamental things like law; like how real people who have problems is not at all the same as how people have legal problems. Americans should realize: they live in a country where even their legal problems have legal problems, and people who want to count ballots better watch out that the Supreme Court does not get in their way. Strange cases might involve something more unusual than "two persons arrested for stealing money." (p. 22). If one of them is younger, it might be assumed that the other "is a hardened criminal, arrested and convicted many times for various offenses. His stealing is a part of a pattern of behavior." (p. 20). Judges might expect to consider that a young person hasn't had time to get caught as often, in imposing their sentences, but this book expects [wrongly, I'm sure] the jurors to be informed of everything the defendants ever did, and then argue about giving more punishment to whomever is worse. "In the cases of the two thieves, we can imagine a debate among the jurors, some of whom might argue that, independent of the histories of the accused persons, equal crimes should be treated equally, and some of whom argue that background factors should be taken into consideration in dispensing justice." (p. 22). If an attorney is effectively representing the thieves, all the extraneous information about a pattern of behavior will be excluded as prejudicial beyond the weight of its probative value, but this book, like most philosophy, would totally boggle everyone's mind if it tried to realistically describe how attorneys can complicate things. Sentencing guidelines now take much of this out of the hands of judges, so any defendant who is not treated according to a standardized chart could become an obstacle to the judge advancing in federal courts, where confirmation hearings harp on odd behavior. Pickering is not listed in the index, but the Democrats in the U.S. Senate are unlikely to confirm him for an Appeals court because of the case of Daniel Swan, who seemed to Pickering to be too young and drunk to serve six years for burning a cross in the yard of the interracial couple in his neighborhood. Causing trouble in his neighborhood was something that even his neighbors didn't seem too concerned about, if you can guess which state he lived in. Whole vast crowds of people have been burning crosses in movies that I have seen, set back in the days before television, when people got out and did things together, and everybody had some sense of what kind of consequences, like arson or bombing, was sure to follow. Daniel Swan might have been released from prison in less than two years, sentenced for a lesser crime than whatever Timothy McVeigh was convicted of for an actual revolutionary bombing, but McVeigh was old enough to know better, as anyone who ever went to Waco, Texas to try to help David Koresh must be by now.

I'm far too extreme to read a whole book that considers anything which is perfectly clear an extreme. "The extreme right-to-life position advances the following considerations in support of its position: First, it argues that from the moment of conception, a human fetus is a human being, and that all human beings are persons. Second, as mentioned above, it states that such persons are innocent of any crime." (p. 23). The second step is necessary because we already know that people who have been born are part of a society that constantly kills, sometimes counting the dead, but considering the production of meat an agricultural item that is easier to replenish than 90 percent of the large fish in the ocean, now that we have almost saved the whales. If there is anything people haven't killed, I am not sure if I have heard of it, though I know that in section 125 of THE GAY SCIENCE, Nietzsche wrote, " `Where is God?' he cried; `I'll tell you! We have killed him -- you and I! We are all his murderers. . . . Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? -- Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" For real Christians, it is communion that makes this kind of thing a ritual participation in who we are, body and blood, and if killing millions is what we do, it seems likely to continue regardless of anything this book might say about protecting the innocent.