Duncan Pritchard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the Director of the Eidyn research centre . In this post, he introduces his new book. Philosophically speaking, the problem of radical scepticism—that is, the challenge to explain how knowledge is even possible—is both my first love and my true love. It was this puzzle that first drew me into philosophy, and it’s also this topic that I have returned to throughout my academic career. My thinking has finally been distilled into a book, entitled EpistemicAngst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015). In this work I offer a comprehensive—and completely novel—response to the (Cartesian) paradox of radical scepticism. The book falls into four parts. In part one, I argue that the reason why the radical sceptical paradox has been so hard to resolve is that it is in fact two logically distinct paradoxes in disguise—one formulation that turns on the ‘closure...
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