The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kingens College London and the LMU in Munich, online at

W.W. History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview with Dominic Perle, who is professor of philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Hi Dominic?

Hello.

Thanks for coming on the podcast.

We're going to be talking about skepticism in medieval philosophy.

And this seems like a kind of surprising topic.

It would be easy to assume that medieval thinkers

don't really get into the issue of skepticism

because they have very confident beliefs, religious beliefs, and other beliefs about metaphysics, the nature of the soul and all sorts of things.

And we might suppose that it's really with early modern philosophy with figures like

de Khut that skepticism comes back into the history of philosophy after playing a role in

antiquity with the ancient skeptics. So what reason is there even to think that medieval philosophers have something to say about the topic of skepticism?

First of all, we should take into account that medieval thinkers were familiar with ancient sources.

In particular, they knew quite well the academic tradition.

They read Cicero's Academica and Augustine's Contraacademikos. That's why they were familiar with many

skeptical scenarios, say sensory illusions,

the dream hypothesis, or even the hypothesis that

a divine being could intervene and manipulate our cognitive states.

So that gave rise to many skeptical debates.

They started in the 13th century. Henry of Gend is a famous person who read Augustine and commented on all the skeptical cases presented in Contra-academikos. Then we shouldn't forget that it was in fact the

...