Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• Roberto Roberto

professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Oswald Porchat and his followers define his neo-Pyrrhonism as a philosophy that strives to rethink, update, and extend the old Pyrrhonian skepticism, reformulating the classical notions of truth, reality and even knowledge in "skeptical" or "phenomenal" terms. This paper has two aims. First, I will show that such Brazilian neo-Pyrrhonism is nothing more than an updated version of Kant's transcendental idealism (when read metaphysically, as Paul Guyer did) or what Barry Stroud idiosyncratically calls "verificationism." Since at least Berkeley, this has been a recurrent pattern in the modern history of external-world skepticism: whenever skeptics suspend their ordinary belief in a mind-independent reality while still having to make sense of their ordinary lives, they ultimately embrace some form of idealism—one that they should have questioned in the first place. The second aim of this article is to show that Kant's refutation of idealism is a transcendental argument that is both ambitious (truth-directed) and successful against neo-Pyrrhonism.

Keywords

• Skepticism
• Idealism
• Transcendental Idealism
• Phenomenal Idealism
• Pyrrhonism

Main Subjects

• philosophy