Sceptical Sentence Examples

Even in that book Hume is able to play with sceptical solutions.

But, having said this, Kant went on to repeat the sceptical suggestion.

Sceptical views are expressed in Job, Prov.

Kant swept away, so far as his influence extended, such " dogmatic metaphysics " and the old-fashioned theism which it constituted or included; but Kant himself introduced, in his own more sceptical yet also more moral type of theistic doctrine, a new trichotomy - God, Freedom, Immortality, the three " postulates " of the practical reason."

Mansel tried (1858) to play Pascal's game on Kantian principles, developing the sceptical side of 'Kant's many-faceted mind.

The key to Reid's philosophy is to be found in his revulsion from the sceptical conclusions of Hume.

Though an alchemist, Boyle, in his Sceptical Chemist (1661), cast doubts on the " experiments whereby vulgar Spagyrists are wont to endeavour to evince their salt, sulphur and mercury to be the true principles of things," and advanced towards the conception of chemical elements as those constituents of matter which cannot be further decomposed.

The sceptical suspension of judgment has its limits, however.

It is as the official representative of this scientific and sceptical departure that Speusippus is entitled to a place in the history of philosophy.

Cook had sailed by without suspecting its presence; Captain John Meares (c. 1756-1809), another English navigator, who visited the region in 1788, declared that no such river existed, and actually called its estuary "Deception Bay"; and George Vancouver, who visited the coast in 1792, was sceptical until he learned of Gray's discovery.

Hasty judgment, bias, absence of an a priori " indifference " to what the evidence may in the end require us to conclude, undue regard for authority, excessive love for custom and antiquity, indolence and sceptical despair are among the states of mind marked by him as most apt to interfere with the formation of beliefs in harmony with the Universal Reason that is active in the universe.

Hume had not yet shown the sceptical objections against conclusions which Locke accepted without criticism.

Darwin himself seems never to have questioned, in the sceptical direction in which his followers have applied his principles, the absolute character of moral obligation.

But others were not slow to draw the obvious conclusions; and it may be conjectured that Gorgias's sceptical development of the Zenonian logic contributed, not less than Protagoras's sceptical development of the Ionian physics, to the diversion of the intellectual energies of Greece from the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of culture.

Without much learning and sceptical in religious matters, he had the Character lively intelligence of the Gascon, more subtle than of Henry iv.

These criticisms disclose nothing like a sceptical state of mind, but rather a reversion from the metaphysical to the theological stage of thought.

Paris became the centre of a sceptical society, which the decrees of bishops and councils, and the enthusiasm of the orthodox doctors and knights-errant of Catholicism, were powerless to extinguish.

Many metallurgists were sceptical on theoretical grounds about his results, and only became convinced when they saw that his process was really able to convert melted cast iron into malleable iron in a perfectly fluid state.

The controversy depends upon the consideration of a wealth of detail, which should be studied in Ridgeway's book; but zoological authorities are sceptical as to the suggested species, Equus caballus libycus.

The natural tendency of his mind is often (and correctly) spoken of as sceptical.

His Dialogues philosophiques, written in 1871, his Ecclesiastes (1882) and his Antichrist (1876) (the fourth volume of the Origins of Christianity, dealing with the reign of Nero) are incomparable in their literary genius, but they are examples of a disenchanted and sceptical temper.

It is not a little remarkable that we should find in Hume, not only the sceptical dissolution of all fixity of cognition, which is the inevitable result of the individualist method, but also the clearest consciousness of the very root of the difficulty.

But, despite this resemblance, it seems clear that, so far as the Dissertation is concerned, the way had only been prepared for the true critical inquiry, and that the real import of Hume's sceptical problem had not yet dawned upon Kant.

Until the time of John Dalton, the atomic conception remained purely qualitative, and until then it does not appear to have 1 Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (1661); The Usefulness of Natural Philosophy (1663).

The Thomist compromise - or even the more sceptical view of "two truths " - has the merit of giving filling of a kind to the formula " supernatural revelation " - mysteries inaccessible to reason, beyond discovery and beyond comprehension.

Abbott (Philomythus, and elsewhere) suspect Newman of a sceptical leaven and extend the criticism to Butler's doctrine of " probability."

At this time, in association with the keen humanists Conrad Mutian, Crotus Rubeanus and Eoban Hess, he was of sceptical tendency; moving to Wittenberg in 1519, he became evangelical under the teaching of Melanchthon and the preaching of Luther.

But dogmatic atheism is rare compared with the sceptical type, which is identical with agnosticism in so far as it denies the capacity of the mind of man to form any conception of God, but is different from it in so far as the agnostic merely holds his judgment in suspense, though, in practice, agnosticism is apt to result in an attitude towards religion which is hardly distinguishable from a passive and unaggressive atheism.

There are differences between them, arising naturally enough from differences of temperament and experience; but both agree in their attitude - an attitude which is sceptical without being negative and humorous without being satiric. There is hardly any writer in whom the human comedy is treated with such completeness as it is in Montaigne.

He was thus a "familiar spirit," akin to the "daemon" of Socrates; and if he was also half the devil of theology, half the kobold of old German myth, this was only because such "objectivations" are apt to clothe themselves in forms borrowed from the common stock of ideas current at the time when the seer lives; and Faust lived in an age obsessed with the fear of the devil, and by no means sceptical of the existence of kobolds.

Among the pre-Socratic nature-philosophers of Greece, Heraclitus and the Eleatics are the chief representatives of this polemic. The diametrical opposition of the grounds on which the veracity of the senses is impugned by the two philosophies (see Heraclitus, Parmenides, Eleatic School) was in itself suggestive of sceptical reflection.

Passing from this particular vein of sceptical or semi-sceptical thought, we find, as we should expect, that the downfall of Scholasticism, and the conflict of philosophical theories and religious confessions which ensued, gave a decided impetus in 16th to sceptical reflection.

Of more or less isolated thinkers may be mentioned Francois de la Mothe le Vayer (1588-1672), whose Cinq Dialogues appeared after his death under the pseudonym of Orosius Tubero; Samuel Sorbiere (1615-1670), who translated the Hypotyposes Pyrrhoneae of Sextus Empiricus; Simon Foucher (1644-1696), canon of Dijon, who wrote a History of the Academics, and combated Descartes and Malebranche from a sceptical standpoint.

If this dream or prejudice be exploded, then the scepticism originating in it - and a large proportion of recent sceptical thought does so originate - loses its raison d'etre.

In 1811, while residing with his wife's relations at Hardenberg, near Göttingen, he was brought into contact with German mysticism, which considerably modified his earlier sceptical views on religion.

C. Lewis in his History of Ancient Astronomy (pp. 466-481) revived the sceptical view, the tendency of modern critics has been rather to exaggerate than to depreciate the value of what was really added by Pytheas to knowledge.

Towards the middle of the 5th century, however, Protagoras of Abdera, taking account of the teaching of the first, and possibly of the second, of the physical successions, and Gorgias of Leontini, starting from the teaching of the metaphysical succession of Elea, drew that sceptical inference from which the philosophers had shrunk.

A bastard Platonism through hostility to Stoicism may become agnostic. Stoicism through hostility to its sceptical critics may prefer to accept some of the positions of the dogmatic nihilist.

We may, however, reject the sceptical hypothesis that Laura was a mere figment of Petrarch's fancy; and, if we accept her personal reality, the poems of her lover demonstrate that she was a married woman with whom he enjoyed a respectful and not very intimate friendship.

He now discovered that Hume's sceptical analysis of the notion of cause was really the treatment of one typical or crucial instance of the much more general problem.

His destructive criticism thus tended to reintroduce the dualism between faith and reason which Scholasticism had laboured through centuries to overcome, though Scotus himself, of course, had no such sceptical intention.

He bided his time, and the transformation of sceptical Florence into an austerely Christian republic claiming the Saviour as its head only increased his resolve to crush the man who had wrought this marvel.

On one occasion a curious set of incidents were described, which happened to be vividly present to the mind of a sceptical stranger who chanced to be in the room during the experiment; events unknown to the inquirer in this instance.

This seems to have been interpreted by its author and by the Sophists in general in a subjective sense, with the result that it became the motto of a sceptical and individualistic movement in contemporary philosophy and ethics.

In confirmation of this view, it may be noted that the authority of Herodotus for the circumstances of the great Persian war, and for all local and other details which come under his immediate notice, is accepted by even the most sceptical of modern historians, and forms the basis of their narratives.

Captain George Vancouver (1758-1798), in charge of a British exploring expedition then engaged in mapping the coast (1792-1794), was sceptical of the existence of the river, but Captain Gray, undiscouraged, persisted in the search and on the 11th of May 1792 anchored in the river which he named Columbia in honour of his ship. The later claim of the United States to all the territory drained by the river was based chiefly upon this discovery by Captain Gray, who had succeeded where Spanish and British had failed.

Accordingly, we find that sceptical thought did not make its appearance till a succession of mutually inconsistent theories as to the nature of the real had suggested the possibility that they might all alike be false.

Though scepticism as a definite school may be said to date only from the time of Pyrrho (q.v.) of Elis, the main currents of Sophistic thought were sceptical in the wider sense of that term.

The prominence given by most of the Sophists to rhetoric, their cultivation of a subjective readiness as the essential equipment for life, their substitution of persuasion for conviction, all mark the sceptical undertone of their teaching.

The captious logic of the Megarian school was indeed in some cases closely related to sceptical results.

But with these insignificant exceptions it holds true that, after the sceptical wave marked by the Sophists, scepticism does not reappear till after the exhaustion of the Socratic impulse in Aristotle.

It was not till - towards the close of the middle ages that a sense of conflict between reason and revelation became "truth' widely prevalent and took shape in the essentially sceptical theory of the twofold nature of truth.

In his " tesmoynages de nostre imbecillite " he follows in the main the lines of the ancients, and he sums up with a lucid statement of the two great arguments in which the sceptical thought of every age resumes itself - the impossibility of verifying our faculties, and the relativity of all impressions.

But it is essential to the sceptical position that reason be dethroned within experience as well as beyond it, and this is undoubtedly the result at which Hume finally arrives.

His first book on the subject was The Sceptical Chemist, published in 1661, in which he criticized the "experiments whereby vulgar Spagyrists are wont to endeavour to evince their Salt, Sulphur and Mercury to be the true Principles of Things."

The authorities at Ottawa were at first careless or sceptical in regard to the danger, the reality of which was only brought home to them when a body of mounted police, advancing to regain a small post at Duck Lake, of which the rebels had taken possession, was attacked and twelve of their number killed.

This easily passes into the further and still more sceptical hypothesis that the works, as we have them, under Aristotle's name, are rather the works of the Peripatetic school, from Aristotle, Theophrastus and Eudemus downwards.

This sceptical conclusion, the contrary of that drawn by Leibnitz from the harmony of thought and style pervading the works, shows us that the Homeric question has been followed by the Aristotelian question.

We have here, in this sceptical idealism, the source of the characteristically English form of idealism still to be read in the writings of Mill and Spencer, and still the starting-point of more recent works, such as Pearson's Grammar of Science and James's Principles of Psychology.

Nothing can be more curious than the way in which a school of English philosophers, which originally started from Hume, the most sceptical of phenomenalists, thus gradually passed over to Leibnitz and Fechner, the originators of panpsychistic noumenalism.

In 1811, while residing with his wife's relations at Hardenberg, near Göttingen, he was brought into contact with German mysticism, which considerably modified his earlier sceptical views on religion.

These ideas formed a striking contrast to the principles both of orthodox and of sceptical writers in Lessing's day, and gave a wholly new direction to religious philosophy.

So far as analysis of knowledge is concerned they are in harmony, and Hume's sceptical conclusions regarding belief in matters of fact are the foundations on which Butler's defence of religion rests.

Equally sceptical with Montaigne, and decidedly more cynical, he is distinguished by a deeper and sterner tone.

For the London Review, founded by Sir William Molesworth in 1834, he wrote a notable article entitled "The Church and its Reform," which was much too sceptical for the time, and injured the Review.

India, the sceptical observe, has yielded no Greek inscription, except, of course, on the coins of the Greek kings and their Scythian rivals and successors.

To the sceptical the truth of Islam is held forth; and a certain, not very cogent, method of demonstration predominates.

While unequivocally rejecting the accepted creeds, and so scandalizing even liberal theologians, he was still more hostile to simply sceptical and materialist tendencies.

Then again, as the movement, taking its rise in the philosophical agnosticism which grew out of the early physical systems, was itself persistently sceptical, sophistry may be regarded as an interlude in the history of philosophy.

Thus Eleaticism, though professedly dogmatic, was inconsistent in its theory of the One and its attributes, and openly sceptical in regard to the world of nature.

In short, from different standpoints, the three philosophical successions had devised systems which were in reality sceptical, though they had none of them recognized the sceptical inference.

But, although Protagoras and Gorgias had examined the teaching of their predecessors so far as to satisfy themselves of its futility and to draw the sceptical inference, their study of the great problem of the day was preliminary to their sophistry rather than a part of it; and, as the overthrow of philosophy was complete and the attractions of sophistry were all-powerful, the question " What is knowledge?

Cadorna was sceptical of an offensive in strength, and thought that the reported movements in the Trentino signified a limited attack, to be undertaken with the object of hampering his offensive towards the east.

Although Cadorna was still sceptical in regard to an offensive in force, he increased Brusati's artillery strength by 18 batteries of middle-calibre guns and gave special orders for the supply and transport of ammunition.

The logic of the Stoics had been discredited by the sceptical onset, but in any case there was no organon of a fitness even comparable to Aristotle's for the task of drawing out the implications of dogmatic premises.

It was not in the nature of the Italians, sceptical and paganized by the Revival, to be revival keenly interested about questions which seemed to revive in Italy.

Natural beds of oysters occur on stony and shelly bottoms at depths varying from 3 to 20 fathoms. In nature the beds are liable to variations, and, although Huxley was somewhat sceptical on this point, it seems that they are easily brought into an unproductive condition by over-dredging.

All the assaults of the sceptical Academy had failed, and within fifty years of the death of Carneades his degenerate successors, unable to hold their ground on the question of the criterion, had capitulated to the enemy.

He dwells with delight on the unselfish patriotism of the old heroes of the republic. In those times children obeyed their parents, the gods were still sincerely worshipped, poverty was no disgrace, sceptical philosophies and foreign fashions in religion and in daily life were unknown.

The history of the epistle's reception into the canon is not opposed to this; for, once it was attributed to James, Syria would be more likely to take it up, while the West, more sceptical, if not better informed as to its origin, held back; just as happened in the case of Hebrews.

In this way, and, so far as the present writer can see, in this way only, it is possible to understand the extraordinary revolution which converted Platonism, philosophical and dogmatic, into Academicism, scientific and sceptical.

From 1760 owing to the gradual spread of the sceptical spirit and the teaching of Voltaire more tolerant views prevailed.

A Bohemian priest, sceptical of the doctrine of transubstantiation, was convinced of its truth by the appearance of drops of blood on the host he was consecrating.

The fixed given points of intuitionalism furnish Hamilton with one of his arguments in his unexpected development towards a sceptical or " faith philosophy."

Formally, Cicero adhered to the Academic 3 philosophy during its " middle " or almost sceptical period.

Or is it simply a reiteration of his sceptical contrast between phenomena and noumena, and of his confinement of (valid) knowledge to the former?

As a philosopher, Favorinus belonged to the sceptical school; his most important work in this connexion appears to have been Hvppwvetot rpoiroc (the Pyrrhonean Tropes) in ten books, in which he endeavours to show that the methods of Pyrrho were useful to those who intended to practise in the law courts.

While this sceptical thesis was embraced by philosophers who had lost their interest in religion, the spiritually minded sought their satisfaction more and more in a mysticism which frequently cast itself loose from ecclesiastical trammels.

It was strenuously contended that the case could not well be otherwise, inasmuch as the art of writing must have been quite unknown in Greece until after the alleged age of the traditional Homer, whose date had been variously estimated at from 1000 to Boo B.C. by less sceptical generations.

With the lessons of recent Oriental archaeology in mind, few will be sceptical enough to doubt that some such contest as that described in the Iliad actually occurred.

Some of the enthusiasts sank into a sceptical, reactionary frame of mind; while others, with deeper convictions or capable of more lasting excitement, attributed the failure to the fact that only halfmeasures and compromises had been adopted by the government.

Against this work and the Ethics of Spinoza the orthodox Cartesians (who were in the majority), no less than sceptical hangers-on like Bayle, raised an all but universal howl of reprobation, scarcely broken for about a century.

But the train of thought is deeply embedded among characteristic sceptical hesitations.

In his Sceptical Chemist (1662) he freely criticized the prevailing scientific views and methods, with the object of showing that true knowledge could only be gained by the logical application of the principles of experiment and deduction.

At the risk no doubt of some defects of culture, the newer education cleared the way for a more positive temper, awoke a new sense of accuracy and of verification, and created a sceptical attitude towards all conventions, whether of argument or of practice.

Zola's Lourdes (Paris, 1894), a criticism from the sceptical point of view, in the form of a realistic novel, has called forth many replies from the Catholic side.

The great critic of scepticism has diverged from idealism toward scepticism again, or has given his idealism a sceptical colour, mitigated - but only mitigated - by faith in the moral consciousness.

Comments upon it, one or two of them sceptical, are in the same journal 1898, pp. 579, 588, 387, 868; 1899, p. 4 2 5; 1 9 01, p. 39 8; 1905, p. 6 79; 1906, pp. 1 49 sqq.

In the Beaux-Arts, Batteux developed a theory which is derived from Locke through Voltaire's sceptical sensualism.

It was begun by Ugolino Vieri of Siena in 1337, and was made to contain the Holy Corporal from Bolsena, which, according to the legend, became miraculously stained with blood during the celebration of mass to convince a sceptical priest of the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Should any one be sceptical as to the sufficiency of these laws to account for the present state of things, science can furnish no evidence strong enough to overthrow his doubts until the sun shall be found growing smaller by actual measurement, or the nebulae be actually seen to condense into stars and systems."

The general tenor of the essays is in complete contrast with this sceptical attitude, at least in its more decided form, and it is worth notice that the motto "Que scai je?"