This is

This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

This episode of Philosophy Bites was sponsored by the Examining Ethics Podcast

from the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePaul University.

You can subscribe to examining ethics on iTunes or listen to episodes at examining ethics

dot org. Are you dreaming that you're listening to philosophy bites?

Is the voice you're now hearing a nocturnal delusion playing out in your deep sleep?

Will you wake up any minute to the playing out in your deep sleep?

Will you wake up any minute to discover that I have vanished?

Well, probably not, but is it at least a possibility?

Eric Switz-Gable wonders how sceptical we should be. the Thanks for having me. The topic we're going to focus on today is skepticism. Now

skepticism has obviously had a big part to play in the history of philosophy.

I wonder if you could say something about that at the start.

Well, there have been some very interesting skeptics in the history of philosophy.

One of my favorite skeptics is

Duangza, an ancient Chinese philosopher.

He argued for all kinds of bizarre seeming things,

like that he might be a butterfly dreaming that he's a human.

And in a sense, Western philosophy gets started with Plato being skeptical about the world

that we think of as the everyday world being real. Yeah and that gets picked up later

throughout the tradition especially in Descartes, who in the first two meditations considered various forms of radical doubt, including the possibility that he might be dreaming, the possibility that he might be being deceived by an evil demon.

And that is the start of modern philosophy traditionally, so we have this skeptical argument that Dakar at least entertains that

...