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Skepticism Can Person Skeptical, Limits Is Doubt  Essay

Skepticism Can person skeptical, limits? Is doubt? Does a person obligation ethical moral reasoning examining beliefs. Are beliefs possessed challenged shown false? How skeptic respond claim a belief doubted? Identify specific belief present response skeptic.

Philosophical skepticism: Its limits

Some philosophers have asserted that it is impossible to know anything and adopt a position of radical skepticism. "Philosophical skepticism attempts to render doubtful every member of a class of propositions that we think falls within our ken" (Klein 2011). An example of philosophical skepticism is manifested in Descartes' Meditations in which the philosopher begins by doubting everything. How does he know, Descartes asks, that the world is not a dream? It is widely accepted that persons may be subject to delusions and cannot accurately perceive reality, but what is to assure us this is not true of the entire world? "Visual experience is in fact notoriously unreliable about certain matters. When I see the mountains in the distance, I have a visual experience as of something purple. But closer inspections reveal that the mountains are really some mottled collection of...

Also, I might be color blind and unable to perceive the green of the mountains accurately, as they really are. My thoughts and personal 'truth' cannot be denied, even though their status as testimony to objective reality may be in doubt.
However, eventually Descartes concludes that even if his senses may play him false at times, there must be a person engaged in the act of doubting who has a real, substantive existence, and thus he is a 'real' person, and all is not an illusion. 'I think therefore I am,' associates the existence of a thinking mind with reality, versus the body, which may be influenced by tiredness, sleep, drugs, mental incapacity, and other aspects of the material world that cloud one's judgment. From his own existence, Descartes deduces that there is a God, given that an imperfect being such as himself is still able to conceive of perfection in his or her thinking mind.

Although the mind-body dualism proposed by Descartes has been questioned, there is some truth to his proposition that certain subjective perceptions cannot be proven or disproven. The mountains look very different…

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References

Grosen, P. (n.d.) Cartesian skepticism. Princeton University. Retrieved:

http://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/descrartes.html

Kemerling, Garth. (2011). Hume: Epistemology. Philosophy Pages. Retrieved:

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4t.htm
Retrieved: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/skepticism/
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