Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Thomas McEvilley - Sculpture in the Age of Doubt.

"In the various religious conflicts, such as the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which have convulsed Europe, the point has been to hold exactly the right opinions; even a slight difference of opinion between, say, a Catholic and a Protestant is enough to bring a sentence of death on the one who is judged to be mistaken and, after death, an eternal sentence of punishment in Hell. In Christian or Islamic wars about dogma, it is true that nothing, literally nothing at all, is more important than the correctness of the opinions one holds - and this even though the opinions in question deal with matters that are obviously unknowable. Granted the intense weight that is placed on opinions, skeptical claims are regarded as foolish or parodic because it is assumed that they are clearly untrue and therefore to hold them could only be a deliberate perversity meant for the sake of being outrageous for the amusement of others. Even in today's supposedly secularized Western society, students recieve with derision, as if they were jokes, the three propositions of the skeptical Greek philosopher Gorgias: (1) that nothing exists, (2) that if anything does exist, it can never be known, and (3) that if, perchance, something exists and can be known, it can never be communicated to anyone else. Yet in the Greek tradition and in several other great philosophical traditions, this attitude is no joke, but has serious underlying purposes."

New York: Allworth Press, 1999. P6.

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