The Necessity of Skepticism
An effort to demonstrate that skepticism has been absolutely essential to the history of western civilization at every level of human endeavor. Belief is inescapable, especially in the public mind, but an uncompromising pursuit of “hard” truth necessitates skeptical inquiry as first proposed by the ancient Hellenistic philosophers Arcesilaus and Carneades. One advantage of this emphasis is that speculative thinking can be encouraged on a hypothetical basis ultimately dependent on empirical verification.

Systematic Disbelief: An Inconoclastic Compulsion
I contrast the secular assumptions of such figures as Hume, Nietzsche, and Russell with the deployment of skepticism to justify belief with arguments to the effect that the inevitability of ignorance necessitates blind faith. This second approach, ultimately derivative of ancient Pyrrhonism and Renaissance fideism, can now be cited in defense of evangelical conservatism on the assumption that uncertainty obliges the acceptance of revelation as the only valid source of the truth. Taken to an extreme, this populist viewpoint contaminates intellectual freedom and actually jeopardizes democracy.

Skepticism and the Eurocentric Tradition
A thorough history of skepticism in western civilization since the pre-Socratic philosophers. The empirical emphasis of such figures in the "Academic" skeptical tradition as Arcesilaus, Carneades, Bacon, Gassendi, Hume, and Russell is balanced against the use of skepticism to justify orthodox belief by such figures as Pyrrho, Aenisidemus, Pico della Mirandola, Descartes, Pascal, and Wittgenstein. Others discussed include Protagoras, Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Mill, Husserl, Heidegger, Rorty, Cavell, and Michael Williams. The importance of skepticism in literature is also treated, for example in the writings of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Keats.