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do you do you Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to

you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust online at

www. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode Beyond Belief, Pyro and Skepticism.

There are a few philosophical issues that are so deep, so troubling, that they make movies about them.

I don't mean intellectual European films, I mean proper movies with special effects budgets.

Hollywood has made blockbusters about free will and future truth, for instance. I have in mind the Tom

Cruz vehicle Minority Report, whose theme comes straight from the deterministic argument in Aristotle's

on interpretation.

The nature of time itself is another obvious case.

I need only mention Back to the Future, to say nothing of Back to the Future Part

2 and Back to the Future Part 3.

But maybe the most cinema-friendly topic in philosophy is skepticism.

The skeptic asks how we can be sure that we know what we think we know.

Perhaps we are prey to systematic falsehood in our beliefs, because we are, say, being used as living batteries in an energy farm built by intelligent machines, while our brains

are, for reasons that remain poorly explained, entertained with a virtual reality called

...