ABSTRACT
By and large, mainstream epistemology treats skepticism as a philosophical challenge to be either met and overcome or defused and set aside. The basic attitude of epistemology has to this extent been dogmatic. Scholarship on Hegel's relation to Pyrrhonism has focused mainly on its epistemological and methodological aspects. The approach taken here is orthogonal or complementary in the same way that questions concerning the value of knowledge and insight are orthogonal to more narrowly epistemological issues. In the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, Schelling defines "dogmatism" as theoretical commitment to the mind-independent, objective reality of a non-finite ground of existence and "criticism" as the contrary commitment to the metaphysical priority of finite subjectivity. The post-Kantian response to this state of affairs is metaphysically ambitious, and to that extent it must remain controversial. Despite that fact, it is promising in way it draws attention to what is valuable in scientific cognition and what makes the demonstrative ideal of knowledge attractive.
