Nietzsche wrote in 1870 while preparing The Birth of Tragedy (1872), “Science, art, and philosophy are now growing into one another so much in me that I shall in any case give birth to a centaur one day.” The project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art Nietzsche adumbrates here actually gets realized in The Birth of Tragedy, explaining the work’s distinctive character. It is a project whose origins lay with Friedrich Schlegel, the leading German Romantic philosopher, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Schlegel had warded off the obvious objection to incorporating art into philosophy/science that this would falsify the latter by championing a radical general skepticism about the veracity of cognition. Nietzsche takes over this aspect of Schlegel’s project as well. Moreover, this whole project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art in light of a radical general skepticism survives after The Birth of Tragedy to reappear in different, more refined permutations throughout Nietzsche’s later works, constituting an indispensable key both to their character – in particular, their metaphysical-epistemological framework – and to their development. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the viability of the project, especially concerning the question of whether or not the radical general skepticism on which it rests is coherent.

Saul Kripke famously raised two sorts of problems for responses to the meaning skeptic that appealed to how we were disposed to use our words in the past. The first related to the fact that our “dispositions extend to only finitely many cases” while the second related to the fact that most of us have “dispositions to make mistakes.” The second of these problems has produced an enormous, and still growing, literature on the purported “normativity” of meaning, but the first has received (at least comparatively) little attention. It will be argued here, however, that (1) the fact that we can be disposed to make mistakes doesn’t present a serious problem for many disposition-based responses to the skeptic, and (2) considerations of the “finiteness” of our dispositions point, on their own, to an important way that the relation between meaning and use must be understood as “normative.”

Theories have been viewed as mirrors of nature and fictions tainted by human subjectivity. This chapter contends that theories are tools that enable humans to act and coordinate. It argues that theories are like maps that can get us from A to B and like models that allow us to simulate interventions in the world. It illustrates how these different conceptions of theory have implications for research in the domain of creativity research. Overall, this chapter shows how a pragmatist approach to methodology sensitizes researchers to anomalies, and data can be used to drive theory toward increasingly useful forms.

In Either/Or I, the aesthete, A, gives us the following diagnosis of his predicament: “I think I have the courage to doubt everything; I think I have the courage to fight everything. But I do not have the courage to know anything, nor to possess, to own anything.” In this chapter, I explore A’s fascinating claim that knowledge requires courage by way of juxtaposing the aesthetic life with Cartesian skeptical doubt. I show that just as the Cartesian doubter seeks refuge from radical skepticism in the safety of introspective knowledge – what is directly present to consciousness – so the aesthete seeks solace in the moment and what is sensuously present to him. Both methods ultimately prove ineffective and spurious, however: Cartesian introspection imprisons us in a mental cage with no beyond, just as aestheticism holds us captive in a self-spun world where our self dissolves. Consequently, what both the aesthete and the Cartesian need to do is to develop the strength to confront and overcome the anxieties that have motivated the flight from “the outer” (the flight from the world) in the first place.

This chapter responds to the objections raised by critics of moderation beginning with the famous remark of Barry Goldwater in 1964. It makes a case for moderation understood as a rebellious attitude that requires courage and non-conformism. It calls attention to the iinstitutional aspects of moderation that are often ignored or underestimated.

This chapter explores the relationship between political moderation and realism and shows that moderation properly understood and practiced is compatible with pragmatic partisanship. It shows that at the core of moderation lies a certain propensity to self-subversion (the term borrowed from A. O. Hirschman).

The last Fifty years have witnessed the rediscovery of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and an increasing exploration of his conception of himself as a moral philosopher. Recent scholarship has dwelt on the eclectic nature of this thinking. Scholars have suggested that Smith draws on and combines elements drawn from across the ancient and modern schools of philosophy, and that the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment is characterised by an awareness of and response to the fact of moral pluralism. This leaves open the possibility that different modes of moral thinking can issue in incommensurable conclusions: that in some cases there might be no way to decide what is the ‘right’ thing to do. I explore the implications of these readings for Smith’s understanding of the role of philosophy in moral decision-making and, more particularly, what this means for teaching moral philosophy. Smith saw philosophy as a specific and limited activity that formed but a small part of the moral life of the individual. Moreover, Smith cautioned against over-ambition in philosophical thinking and warned of the intellectual, social, and political dangers of too much philosophy.

The introduction argues that Cavell’s democratic perfectionism is uniquely situated to respond to the democratic crisis of post-truth politics. It argues that post-truth politics is a political response to the epistemological problem of skepticism. As a first step in exploring democratic perfectionism, the introduction offers a brief overview of Cavell’s interpretation of skepticism and its salience for politics. Section 2 provides a preliminary sketch of skepticism. Section 3 expands what Cavell means by responsiveness. Section 4 discusses how these two concepts shape democratic perfectionism. Section 5 asks, where is the politics in Cavell’s writings? While Cavell never wrote a text that was explicitly about political philosophy, his thoughts on politics are scattered throughout his writings. An initial obstacle to interpreting his democratic perfectionism is identifying where in his thought to look for those ideas. Section 6 explains how these themes are analyzed throughout the remainder of the book.

Epistemological disjunctivism is usually defended in connection with visual perception. The claim is that, in ideal cases, when one knows that p directly through visual-perceptual knowledge, one has rational grounds for believing that p that are both factive and reflectively accessible. This chapter explores the link between epistemological disjunctivism and religious perception. It is argued that, so long as there is indeed a perception of God, there is no clear reason why one should not hold that target religious beliefs likewise enjoy rational grounds that are factive and reflectively accessible. Call this view “religious epistemological disjunctivism.” The view is defended against two objections, and two of its unique advantages are discussed.

This chapter considers the uses of sublime blockage for science. The sublime was, on the one hand, a prod for precision and, on the other hand, a nod to skepticism and mystery, potentially ennobling an otherwise mechanical science. The chapter shows how astronomers, biologists, chemists, electricians, and natural historians and neurologists exploited sublime blockage either to elevate science above crude mechanism or butchery or to engage in skepticism so that it could arguably further scientific research. Such engagement with blockage paved the way for Franz Anton Mesmer’s quackery along with Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to defeat it, but quackery proved to be a more robust foe than anticipated.

This chapter traces the precise urban realities that encouraged the Inns of Court satirists to turn to Thomas Nashe’s urban metaphysical style as they constructed the satires and epigrams that poured from the Inns. In doing so, I aim to clarify both Nashe’s and the city’s central place in the development of this poetic mode, a centrality that has been underrecognized in our literary genealogies. In this confluence of authors writing and reading amidst the city’s various spaces in the last decade of the century, we can see more clearly an urban metaphysical aesthetic, at once plenist, obscure, digressive, and visceral, being put into practice. The first part of this chapter explores the vogue for verse satire in the last years of the century, linking it both to the precise urban conditions out of which its authors wrote and to Nashe’s own skeptical impulses. The latter half examines the satires’ and epigrams’ formal features to show how these poems, just as Nashe’s prose before them, self-consciously reorganized and reprocessed the urban experience in ways that we now associate with the metaphysical style.

The introduction posits the centrality of local environments, and specifically precise London neighborhoods, on a confluence of English writers in the 1590s, including Thomas Nashe, John Donne, John Manningham, and John Marston. In the process, it asserts the importance of these urban localities to the genesis of the metaphysical style of writing, a style not normally associated with the city nor with nonpoetic writing. The methodological emphasis on local environment foregrounds the importance of everyday experience to the creation of literature, picking up on recent work in early modern literary studies in historical phenomenology and affect theory. The introduction also details the profound infleunce of skepticism on this group of writers and intellectuals working in and around the Inns of Court in the 1590s. It argues for the centrality of a specific community of disaffected and privileged young men coming to London in the 1590s to the advent of a particular way of seeing the city and a particular style of writing that we now identify as the metaphysical.

Contemporary moral education could learn a thing or two from the ancient Greco-Romans. This essay introduces the two major varieties of ancient Skepticism: Pyrrhonism and the New Academy, situating them within the current resurgence of interest in virtue ethics that includes, for instance, Stoicism. I then make an argument that the Academic Skeptics – authors like Carneades and Cicero – pursued two major intertwined interests: ethics and natural philosophy. “Ethics,” in the Greco-Roman conception, had a far wider scope than the field of study that we now identify by that label, having to do with how to best live one’s life. In turn, a crucial component of good living was thought to be the ability to understand, through natural philosophy, how the world actually works, in order to avoid taking refuge in psychologically reassuring fantasies of the kind that we refer to nowadays as pseudoscience.

This chapter argues that Thomas Nashe created a novel role for the urban writer that also assumed an innovative set of aesthetic principles that we associate with the metaphysical and that was directly antagonistic to humanist ideals. The dissatisfaction that Nashe felt at his lack of advancement as a member of the supposed intellectual elite contributed to his deeply skeptical outlook on reality and on the efficacy of humanist writing more specifically. As I newly detail in this chapter, the precise quotidian realities of Nashe’s existence in London in the 1590s pushed him to formulate a novel advocacy of contention even as he pushed away the noisiness of the urban public world, an entirely ambivalent stance towards the city embodied in Nashe’s obsession with corners. In formulating a writing approach that corresponded with his objections to Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and to his urban reality, Nashe innovated his prose style into something less mimetic than affective, a style that foregrounded a speedy aimlessness, as well as a heterogeneous mixture of materialist images. Nashe’s prose thus takes up the very features that we now call the metaphysical.

This chapter explains why most atheists are probably not primarily motivated by arguments for atheism and explore what atheists’ nonargumentative motivations could be; things such as intellectual independence, moral repugnance, skepticism, and traumatic experiences.