Silencing the Sceptic? The Prospects for Transcendental Arguments in Practical Philosophy

The lecture deals with the prospects of using transcendental arguments against scepticism in practical philosophy, focusing especially on Stroud’s classic objections from 1968, and his claim that some form of idealism may be required in order to make them work. This might suggest one way in which such arguments are perhaps more effective in the practical case than the theoretical one, because anti-realism in ethics is less revisionary than in theoretical philosophy. But even in practical philosophy, people have often wanted to be more ambitious than this, where they have particularly appealed to ‘retorsive’ transcendental arguments in order to ‘silence the sceptic’ by convicting her of self-contradiction. I argue, however, that such arguments either collapse into deductive transcendental arguments in which the appeal to self-contradiction drops out, or just make the sceptical position harder to rebut, in both the theoretical and practical cases. Overall, then, this paper is pretty pessimistic about the prospects of ambitious transcendental arguments in practical philosophy.
Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is author of Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism (OUP, 2000) and editor of Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects (OUP, 1999).
Moderation: Dr. Sorin Baiasu, Ph. D.