This post inaugurates a new category on the blog, of posts which primarily discuss subjects I’ve found useful in teaching philosophy to undergraduates.
Students and others sometimes worry that scepticism is ‘self-defeating’ in some sense. The thought seems to be something like this:
the sceptic couldn’t consistently be a sceptic if their argument is a good one, since the thesis of scepticism will undermine all knowledge of the external world. But then this will undermine knowledge of the premises of the sceptical argument; and an argument with unknown premises couldn’t be a persuasive argument.
