Scepticism and the Possibility of Knowledge

A.C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited numerous works of philosophy and is the author of biographies of Descartes and William Hazlitt.

• Introduction; Acnowledgements; Part I CARTESIAN RESPONSES; i. Berkeley's Immaterialism; ii Russell, Experience, and the Roots of Science; iii Russell's Transcendental Argument in An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry; Part II VARIETIES OF NATURALISM; i. Wittgenstein On Certainty; ii. Quine's Naturalistic Assumptions; Part III SCEPTICISM AND JUSTIFICATION.

"Grayling (philosophy, Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London) sets himself the goal of refuting—or at least of attempting to refute—the philosophical doctrine that absolute knowledge is impossible. To do so, he considers two sets of arguments from major antiskeptical philosophers—Berkeley and Russell in one tradition and Quine and Wittgenstein in another—and argues that the strategies the aforementioned philosophers used to accomplish their goals are "not so much incorrect as incomplete." He thereupon argues in extensive, closely reasoned, if often turgid detail, his own stratagem—which, he believes, "is the right one overall." Because of the fecundity of the argument, readers will have a difficult time deciding if he has succeeded. This is not a book for beginners in philosophy: it deals with an issue most philosophers consider the central one in philosophy and requires extensive familiarity with the discipline, both current and historical. Recommended for academic collections."—Leon H. Brody, Falls Church, VA Library Journal