The Aristotelian Prescription

Abstract

From a number of quarters have come attempts to answer some form of skepticism—about knowledge of the external world, freedom of the will, or moral reasons—by showing it to be performatively self-defeating. Examples of this strategy are subject to a number of criticisms, in particular the criticism that they fail to shift the burden of proof from the anti-skeptical position, and so fail to establish the epistemic entitlement they seek. To these approaches I contrast one way of understanding Kant‟s core anti-skeptical arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant‟s goal is the more modest one of showing the applicability of the concepts of substance and cause to experience, against those who might call such application incoherent, or a category mistake. I explain why this goal makes Kant‟s approach more promising than those of neoKantian practitioners of otherwise structurally-similar strategies. In his book Insight, Bernard Lonergan purports to demonstrate that certain forms of skepticism are self-defeating. He calls the strategy exemplified by his arguments the “Aristotelian prescription” for dealing with skepticism, after Aristotle‟s discussion, in Book Γ of his Metaphysics, of the impossibility of maintaining that the principle of non-contradiction is false. According to this strategy, if some form of skepticism is performatively self-defeating, the prescription for dealing with it lies in “getting the skeptic to talk”: in articulating his skepticism the skeptic refutes himself. 1 The trick, of course, is showing that the target skepticism really is self-defeating. In this paper I contrast two approaches to filling the Aristotelian prescription. Practitioners of the first approach include Lonergan, C.I. Lewis, Joseph Boyle, Germain Grisez,