Skepticism about the external world / Panayot Butchvarov.

By:

Butchvarov, Panayot, 1933-

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: New York, N.Y. : Oxford University Press, 1998.Description: 1 online resource (viii, 184 pages)Content type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

0585211809
9780585211800
1280470399
9781280470394

Subject(s):

Genre/Form:

Additional physical formats: Print version:: Skepticism about the external world.DDC classification:

121/.2 21

LOC classification:

BD220 .B87 1998eb

Online resources:

Click here to access online

Summary: One of the most important and perennially debated philosophical questions is whether we can have knowledge of the external world. Butchvarov here considers whether and how scepticism with regard to such knowledge can be refuted or at least answered. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception has any hope of providing a compelling response to the sceptic and introduces the radical innovation that the direct object of perceptual, and even dreaming and hallucinatory, experience is always a material object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads him to a metaphysics in which reality is ultimately constructed by human decisions out of objects that are ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to be either real or unreal.

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Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-177) and index.

One of the most important and perennially debated philosophical questions is whether we can have knowledge of the external world. Butchvarov here considers whether and how scepticism with regard to such knowledge can be refuted or at least answered. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception has any hope of providing a compelling response to the sceptic and introduces the radical innovation that the direct object of perceptual, and even dreaming and hallucinatory, experience is always a material object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads him to a metaphysics in which reality is ultimately constructed by human decisions out of objects that are ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to be either real or unreal.

Print version record.

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