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Skepticism About the External World (Hardcover, New)
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Skepticism About the External World (Hardcover, New)
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Do we know or even have evidence that external material objects
exist? Drawing powerfully on techniques from both analytic and
continental philosophy, Butchvarov offers a strikingly original
approach to this perennial issue. He argues that only a direct
realist view of perception--the view that in perception we are
directly aware of material objects--has any hope of providing a
compelling response to the skeptic.
The seemingly insuperable problem for direct realism has always
been to explain hallucination, dreaming, and other situations where
the object of awareness is not a really existing physical object.
This has led many philosophers to adopt views in which perceptual
consciousness involves a subjective state that is the direct object
of awareness. Butchvarov argues persuasively that all such views
are helpless in the face of the skeptic's arguments. His radical
innovation is to insist that the direct object of perceptual and
even dreaming and hallucinatory experience is usually a material
object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads to
a sophisticated metaphysics in which reality is ultimately
constructed by human decisions out of objects that are
ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to
be either real or unreal.
Butchvarov's ingenious approach to a longstanding philosophical
issue, as well as the extensive range of his references to
traditional and contemporary discussions of the topic, makes
Skepticism about the External World a thrilling and essential book
for philosophers and philosophically minded readers.
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