Splash Biography

Are our entire lives just part of one long dream of a person we have never met? Do any physical objects exist outside of our minds? Will the Sun rise tomorrow? Does 2+2=5? We seem to know the answers to these questions, yet when we examine the justifications for these beliefs, we often find them lacking. This question, whether we can ever know anything, has been called the fundamental problem of philosophy. In this course, we will examine what knowledge is and how we can come to know something by looking at classical skeptical arguments from ancient Greece up until today, trying to better understand this important way we interact with the world. While it won't always be easy, and there is no book with answers in the back (or even answers, sometimes), properly investigating how we can know things changes the way we view our world and the life we live in it.

Does the world exist? This seems like a fairly easily answered question--after all, we see the world around us, interact with it on a daily basis, and generally assume that it is there. But how do we really know that there is an external world? If we can call this into question, what else can we question? How do we know that anything exists? Can we even know that we exist? This course looks at some of the philosophical responses to these questions that have been presented over the years, mainly focusing on the works of Rene Descartes.