SCEPTICISM, FAITH, AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY (NIHILISM, FOUNDATIONALISM, EPISTEMOLOGY)

This dissertation is concerned with challenges to epistemic realism in three domains of Western culture: the empirical, the moral, and the theological. It is my contention that in these areas realism has lost its grip on the Western mind because the nature of truth and justification has not been properly understood. More specifically, the relations between foundationalism, nihilism, and scepticism have not been understood.;The third alternative for which I argue in this work is a kind of scepticism. Meta-scepticism, as I conceive it, construes truth as correspondence between something subjective and something objective (e.g., words and world) but denies any privileged or incorrigible access to the latter. We cannot know with absolute certainty that we know anything at all, but this leaves open the possibility of justified true belief. This is sufficient to preserve realism as a paradigm for inquiry.;My treatment of these issues is partly historical and partly modern, as well as cross-disciplinary. And just as I attempt to weave a common thread through the authors examined, while respecting their individual differences; so I attempt to highlight the similarities between the domains of culture reviewed, while respecting their uniqueness.;Foundationalism is the view that knowledge claims must rest (and do rest) on indubitable or incorrigible impressions which provide absolute certainty about objective fact. Such uncompromising standards cannot actually be met, however; there are no such impressions in any cultural context. Thus foundationalism is an impossible ideal. Nihilism is the antithesis of foundationalism in that in seeking to avoid dogmatism it jettisons any recognizable conception of objective truth or of epistemic justification. Such an extreme view is implausible, because it eliminates virtually all rational checks on claims to know. It is only because foundationalist criteria are so often insisted upon that nihilism has its current popularity; but once foundationalism is seen to be utopian, nihilism can be dismissed as anarchic. Thus the two live one another's life and die one another's death.