SCHOLAR ISLAND

"Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul."

Thomas Carlyle

"Great intellects are skeptical."

-Nietzsche

"Skeptics are the leading dogmatists."

-Alfred North Whitehead

"Do not let yourself be tainted with a barren skepticism."

-Louis Pasteur

   "Most Skeptics believe there are no absolute moral truths: less than one out of every five accept the existence of moral absolutes. Instead, they believe that truth can be ascertained only through experience, reason, and logic, and that it varies from situation to situation. They buy this view so strongly that eight out of ten of them teach their own kids relativism; just 4 percent even raise the possibility that absolutes may exist. When it comes time to make critical moral choices, they rely on their feelings and experiences to guide them.

   Besides supporting the idea that there are no moral absolutes, Skeptics have some well-defined views of other faiths. The dominant American faith-Christianity-is something they perceive to be unappealing. Specifically, two-thirds or more of the Skeptic population describe Christianity as judgmental, old-fashioned, out of touch with reality, and insensitive to other people. The fact that more than three-quarters of Skeptics see Christians as hypocritical further dampens their willingness to take what the group says seriously."

-George Barna

The Seven faith Tribes: Who They Are, What They Believe, and Why They Matter

"And if you cannot find a way to aid human progress in human affairs, then know that the smirking of the side-line-critic is a form of plague--and to be one of those is to be a carrier of death instead of a preserver of life."

-Robert Fulghum

"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, Santayana declared, and the metaphor is apt. The mind that seeks the deepest intellectual fulfillment does not give itself up to every passing idea. Yet what is sometimes forgotten is the larger purpose of such a virtue. For in the end, chastity is something one preserves not for its own sake, which would be barren, but rather so that one may be fully ready for the moment of surrender to the beloved, the suitor whose aim is true. Whether in knowledge or in love, the capacity to recognize and embrace that moment when it finally arrives, perhaps in quite unexpected circumstances, is essential to the virtue. Only with that discernment and inward opening can the full participatory engagement unfold that brings forth new realities and new knowledge. Without this capacity, at once active and receptive, the long discipline would be fruitless. The carefully cultivated skeptical posture would become finally an empty prison, an armored state of unfulfillment, a permanently confining end it itself rather than the rigorous means to a sublime result."

Richard Tarnas

Cosmos and Psyche: Intimation of a New World View

"While the ancient skeptics advocated learned ignorance as the first step in honest inquiries toward truth, later medieval skeptics, both Moslem and Christians, used skepticism as a tool to avoid accepting what today we call science. Belief in the importance of the Black Swan problem, worries about induction, and skepticism can make some religious arguments more appealing, though in stripped-down, anticlerical, theistic form. This idea of relying on faith, not reason, was known as fideism. So there is a tradition of Black Swan skeptics who found solace in religion, best represented by Pierre Bayle, a French-speaking Protestant erudite, philosopher, and theologian, who, exiled in Holland, built an extensive philosophical architecture related to the Pyrrhonian skeptics. Bayle's writings exerted some considerable influence on Hume, introducing him to ancient skepticism-to the point where Hume took ideas wholesale from Bayle. Bayle's Dictionaire historique et critique was the most read piece of scholarship of the eighteenth century, but like many of my French heroes (such as Frederic Bastiat), Bayle does not seem to be part of the French curriculum and is nearly impossible to find in the original French language. Nor is the fourteenth-century Algazelist Nicolas of Autrecourt.

   Indeed, it is not a well-known fact that the most complete exposition of the ideas of skepticism, until recently, remains the work of a powerful Catholic bishop who was an august member of the French Academy. Pierre-Daniel Huer wrote his Philosophical treatise on the Weaknesses of the Human Mind in 1690, a remarkable book that tears through dogmas and questions human perception. Huer presents arguments against causality that are quite potent-he states, for instance, that any even can have an infinity of possible causes."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

"I prefer credulity to skepticism and cynicism, for there is more promise in almost anything than in nothing at all."

-Ralph Barton Perry

"Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him.....But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on earth. He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address."

-G.K. Chesterton

"Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: 'On to God!"

-Max Planck

"The originating cause of Skepticism is, we say, the hope of attaining quietude. Men of talent, who were perturbed by the contradictions in things and in doubt as to which of the alternatives they ought to accept, were led on to inquire what is true in things and what false, hoping by the settlement of this to attain quietude. The main basic principle of the Skeptic system is that of opposing to every proposition an equal proposition; for we believe that as a consequence of this we end by ceasing to dogmatize."

-Sextus Empiricus

"Once it was the skeptic, the critic of the status quo, who had to make a great effort. Today the skeptic is the status quo. The one who must make a great effort is the man who seeks to create a new moral order."

-John Gardner

Self-Renewal

"The cynic makes fun of all earnestness: he makes fun of everything and everyone who feels that something can be done.....But in his heart of hearts he knows that he is a defeated man and that his cynicism is merely an expression of the fact that he has lost courage and is beaten."

-George E. Vincent

"Cold , cynical people are not only unhappy, but are dead to the spiritual values that make life. Only the positive attitude in acts of kindness and peace will give the joyous life."

-Dr. Charles Reynolds Brown

"I worry no matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."

-Jane Wagner

"Novelist Wallace Stegner has defined irony as "that curse, that armor, that evasion, that way of staying safe while seeming wise."

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Book: "The Modes of Skepticism" by J. Annas and J. Barnes

Book: "Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic" by Michael Scammell