Mohamed R. answered • 05/21/21
Bachelor degree in English with experience in philosophy tutoring.
Hi Oluwabukunmi,
This is a possible answer to your question.
Traditional skepticism is usually centered on the topics of knowledge and belief. Socrates views an Wiseman as someone who knows that he knows nothing. For him the more we know, the more we realize we do not know anything. Following Socrates path, Plato distinguishes knowledge and belief. Anything that is not justified is simply a belief. A belief should be justified to become knowledge. Likewise, Plato doubts that we can know anything in the external world, considering that the Forms (properties) exist in another realm, and this World is simply a shadow of the real world that Plato names the Archetypal world.
Another type of traditional skepticism comes from Epicurus, who believes that we do not know reality. All we know is void filled by atoms that affect our perceptions. We do not even know objects and their properties. This atomist view impacts other skeptics such as Cicero, who claims that there is no knowledge at all.
The Sophists are another source of skepticism. They claim that matters appear to people in different ways. That means there is no way anyone can know the truth about anything. The Sophists refute anything called "logic." Instead they rely on "rhetoric" for discussions of anything.
Zeno, the founder of Stoicism is also viewed as a skeptic. For him, knowledge is very difficult to attain, but ultimately within the reach of human beings. He also distinguishes between cognitive and non-cognitive senses and links cognitive senses to his "Criterion Truth."
Pyrrhonism is another form of traditional skepticism who aims to attain "tranquility" through upholding judgement. Pyrrho states that things are "equally indifferent and unstable and indeterminate". So, neither our senses nor or our beliefs can tell the truth. Pyrrhonism also distinguishes between appearances and reality. This idea will later on be developed by the eighteenth-century philosopher, Kant, who names appearances as "phenomena" and reality as "noumena."
To conclude, the traditional skepticism centers around the issues of knowledge and belief. Another type of skepticism will develop in the seventeenth century, mainly by Descartes. Such skepticism centers around certainty and rationality using "methodology". That explains why it is named "methodological skepticism". Descartes doubts anything in existence, except his mind. He attempts to prove anything uncertain to him through deductive methodological approach. In the eighteenth century, David Hume will develop another skepticism known as "Empirical Skepticism". Hume will doubt causal connections, and he will state that we only know the constant conjunctions through habitual events, but not the causal connections of things in the World. Hume then doubts the inductive approach and the seventeenth-century mechanistic science that explains natural processes in terms of matter, motion, separate indivisible atoms, and causal connections.
