Skepticism about the external world

by Panayot Butchvarov

Do we know or even have evidence that external material objects exist? Drawing powerfully on techniques from both analytic and continental philosophy. Butchvarov offers a strikingly original approach to this perennial issue. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception - the view that in perception we are directly aware of material objects - has any hope of providing a compelling response to the skeptic. His radical innovation is to insist that the direct object of perceptual and even dreaming and hallucinatory experience is usually a material object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads to a sophisticated metaphysics in which reality is ultimately constructed by human decisions out of objects that are ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to the either real or unreal.