Part 2: Modern Skepticism
Tags: Enlightenment, Rene Descartes, Skepticism, Philosophy, David Hume

The matrix dominating the modern world is just losing its sense and credibility more and more, to the point that we don’t know if we can trust our eyes anymore! Encountering this phenomenon, there are usually those who restore to the good old Skeptic fashion, and there are those who think of the former as crazy pessimists who have read too much Nietzsche and they’re losing the sense in what’s too obvious that they can’t see it anymore. Well, modern Skepticism mostly concerns the first group, and questions the physical, metaphysical and spiritual knowledge of humans, to our very existence…

Through the Medieval period and with the Christian philosophy growing, the influence of the Skeptic doctrine was dimmed, up to the rise of the Enlightenment when Skepticism went through its “golden age”.

There are doubts on who the father of Modern Skepticism is, the majority thinks of David Hume to be so; personally, I see René Descartes as the father of Modern Skepticism.

The new rise of Skepticism, broke the Ancient categories of the philosophy and divided up Skepticism into 2 new branches:

Methodological Skepticism

2. Philosophical Skepticism

The first school, Methodological Skepticism, more commonly known as Cartesian doubt or simply the Method of Doubt is completely based on the teachings of the rationalist philosopher René Descartes and represents an entirely different idea from what the Ancient Skepticism went for.

Doubting every single belief that we hold is the first principle of Descartes’ Skepticism. It subjects all our knowledge, beliefs and claims to analysis and aims to distinguish the true from false. It teaches us to doubt our most fundamental beliefs once in a while and not to give 100% credit to any idea, except …

“I think, therefore I am”. According to Descartes, this is all that we can be sure about and it would be irrational to doubt this statement, as long as one thinks, one exists and there is NO doubt in that; everything else should be sorted out every once in a while. Methodological Skepticism also provides us with the “Dream Argument”. It claims that we can’t trust our senses to know if we are awake or everything we are experiencing is a dream. This argument is one of the main reasons why Descartes’ Rationalism is opposed to Empiricism that relies too much on the senses and conceives reality in our experiences and perceptions of the external world.

Cartesian doubt adopts a more optimistic attitude towards order in the world and capabilities of humans in obtaining knowledge, it has a principle statement that is the background for all the ideas that this philosophy supports, it’s claimed to be unconditionally true, and from this aspect, it’s closer to Academic Skepticism.

The second and more radical branch of Skepticism is “Philosophical Skepticism”. It questions the possibility of certainty and is essentially Ancient Skepticism, the Academic and Pyrrhonian schools united. In the sub-categories of Philosophical Skepticism there are doctrines claiming that “we can’t know anything”, “the world is chaotic and there is nothing to know”, or “ we only can know that we can’t know anything”. All of these ideas are unified under the same name, because of their similar outcome: Philosophical Skepticism suggests that we should “suspend judgment”.

About a century after Descartes, David Hume, the British Empiricist philosopher introduced his own version of Skepticism, as opposed to Descartes’ in many aspects. The Empiricist vs Rationalist battle is old and rusty now, but there’s still no definite answer or explanation vouching for credibility of any of them, so realizing we don’t know if we can trust our senses to derive knowledge from the world outside, or if we can reach some understanding of the world by referring to our rational minds, Skepticism and admitting that we don’t know ANYTHING is really the best solution!