ABSTRACT
Traditionally, philosophy has not only been centrally concerned with metaphysics but with epistemology as well. This has particularly been true and insistent during the modern period from Descartes to Kant and coming down, particularly in Anglo-America, into the contemporary period. With a variety of mainstream philosophers, epistemology (theory of knowledge) has remained a central preoccupation. Philosophical skepticism is, after all, very peculiar and is, at least on the face of it, rather different from the ordinary garden variety skepticisms about morality, politics, personal relations, religion, aesthetic canons, and the like. The philosophical skeptic purports to be skeptical about knowledge of the external world or of other minds. In real life anyone who had such doubts-wondered, really wondered, whether there really is an external world (whether there are rocks and trees) and whether other people had minds-would rightly be judged to be insane. And the skeptic herself behaves exactly like the person of common sense.
