The Limits of Epistemology

At the centre of modern epistemology lurks the problem of scepticism: how can we know that the forms of our cognition are compatible with the world? How can we state success conditions for knowledge claims without somehow transcending our discursive and fallible nature as knowers? By distinguishing different forms of scepticism, Markus Gabriel shows how all objective knowledge relies on shared discourses and how the essential corrigibility of knowledge claims is a crucial condition of their objectivity. We should understand scepticism not so much as posing a threat, but as offering a vital lesson about the fallibility of discursive thinking. By heeding this lesson, we can begin to reintegrate the solipsistic subject of modern epistemology back into the community of actual knowers. Taking his cue from Hegel, Wittgenstein and Brandom, Gabriel shows how intentionality as such is a public rather than a private phenomenon. He concedes that the sceptic can prove the necessary finitude of objective knowledge, but denies that this has to lead us into an aporia. Instead, it shows us the limits of the modern project of epistemology. Through an examination of different kinds of sceptical paradoxes, Gabriel not only demonstrates their indispensable role within epistemological theorising, but also argues for the necessary failure of all totalizing knowledge claims. In this way, epistemology, as the discipline that claims knowledge about knowledge, begins to grasp its own fallibility and, as a result, the true nature of its objectivity.  The Limits of Epistemology will be of great value to students and scholars of philosophy.

Preface to the English Edition                                        Introduction                                                          Part I               The Function of Scepticism                       Chapter 1 Negative Dogmatism and Methodological Scepticism Chapter 2 Kant’s Negative Dogmatism              Chapter 3 Metaphysical Realism and the Naïve Ontology of Individuals Chapter 4 Conceptual Relativity and the World         Chapter 5 Direct and Indirect Sceptical Arguments: The Path to Semantic Nihilism                           Chapter 6 Crispin Wright’s Implosion of Cartesian Scepticism and its Dialectic                                     Part II              Contextualism and the Finitude of Discourse           Chapter 7 Pyrrhonian Scepticism as the Agent of Epistemology Chapter 8 Contextualism, Normativity and the Possibility of Discursive Determinacy                           Chapter 9 Private Language and Assertoric Content     Chapter 10 The Diametrical Opposite of Solipsism Chapter 11 McDowell’s Disjunctivism as an Anti-Sceptical Strategy Chapter 12 Stage-Setting and Discourse: The Community in Context Chapter 13 Solipsism’s Representations and Cartesian Scepticism Chapter 14 The Failure of Liberal Naturalism’s Metatheory   Chapter 15 A Final Attempt to Recover the World: Brandom with Hegel Notes Bibliography