The Sponge of Apelles

Alexander Nehamas

  • The Skeptical Tradition edited by Myles Burnyeat
    University of California Press, 434 pp, £36.75, June 1984, ISBN 0 520 03747 2
  • The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes
    Cambridge, 204 pp, £20.00, May 1985, ISBN 0 521 25682 8
  • Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties by P.F. Strawson
    Methuen, 98 pp, £10.95, March 1985, ISBN 0 416 39070 6
  • Hume’s Skepticism in the ‘Treatise of Human Nature’ by Robert Fogelin
    Routledge, 195 pp, £12.95, April 1985, ISBN 0 7102 0368 3
  • The Refutation of Scepticism by A.C. Grayling
    Duckworth, 150 pp, £18.00, May 1985, ISBN 0 7156 1922 5
  • The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism by Barry Stroud
    Oxford, 277 pp, £15.00, July 1985, ISBN 0 19 824730 3

Thales of Miletus, with whom histories of Western philosophy conventionally begin, was said to have been so concerned with the heavens that he fell into a well while he was gazing at the stars. Ever since then (ever since they have existed, that is) philosophers have been objects of amusement and subjects of satire. For one thing, philosophical views often seem intolerably abstruse. For another, their sheer number, the sheer multiplicity of different equally abstruse views on the nature of the world or on the form of the good life, can itself constitute the ground of suspicion and criticism. And so, of course, it has.

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Vol. 7 No. 17 · 3 October 1985 » Alexander Nehamas » The Sponge of Apelles (print version)
Pages 12-15 | 5404 words