Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification

This work, written from a neo-Pyrrhonian perspective, is an examination of contemporary theories of knowledge and justification. It takes ideas primarily found in Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism, restates them in a modern idiom, and then asks whether any contemporary theory of knowledge meets the challenge they raise. The first part, entitled Gettier and the Problem of Knowledge, attempts to rescue our ordinary concept of knowledge from those philosophers who have assigned burdens to it that it cannot bear. Properly understood, Fogelin shows that the concept of knowledge is unproblematic. The second part of this study, called Agrippa and the Problem of Justification, examines Agrippa's contribution to Pyrrhonism, a systemizing of its procedures which came to be known as the Five Modes Leading to the Suspension of Belief. These modes present a completely general procedure for refuting any claim a dogmatist might make. Though largely unnoticed, there is an uncanny resembleance between problems posed by Agrippa's Five Modes and those that contemporary epistemologists address under the heading of a theory of justification. Fogelin examines the strongest contemporary theories of justification--in both foundationalist and anti-foundationalist forms. The Pyrrhonian conclusion is that recent philosophical writings on justification have made no significant progress in responding to the Pyrrhonian problems they have raised.