In this episode I introduce a brief history of scepticism, that is the doubt whether we can have any certain knowledge of the external world. I start with the Greek philosopher Sextus Empircus who lived in the second century AD. His arguments were taken up and developed by the French Renaissance writer Michel Montaigne (1533-1592). Two French philosophers - Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) and his friend Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) - rejected this rather defeatist version of scepticism and proposed a more moderate form: it accepts that we can know a lot about the appearances but nothing about the underlying causes. Modern scepticism, as represented by the philosopher Karl Popper and the physicist Sean Carroll, defends the idea of conjectural knowledge. Science knows about appearances and the underlying causes but this knowledge is conjectural because it is always at the risk of refutation and revision.
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