Philosophy and skepticism

So today I went to Barnes and Noble to get a math regents prep book. And while I was there I decided to sit down, among books, and do my philosophy homework. My friend Suphasa brought me 3 books about philosophy: philosophy for dummies, the idiots guide to philosophy, and just philosophy. Since I consider myself neither a dummy nor an idiot, I looked through “philosophy”. The book was very interesting; I wish I actually had more time to look through it. I mainly looked at the idea of skepticism because that’s what I needed to do for homework. The book made some very strong points about skepticism. I was completely amazed at how many different forms of philosophy there are and how almost all go back to ancient times. Now I have some various opinions on our unit for philosophy. At first I thought it was all kind of useless. I thought philosophy is just the way you choose to direct your life, but now I do believe that this unit could be beneficial to my knowledge.

                I decided to choose skepticism as the main topic because it’s an interesting point; there isn’t enough evidence for anything. There are some completely obvious things that the vast majority of us agree to, water is wet, and we are humans, and so on. But some early philosophers called these “obvious” things into question. Before you simply assume that they were insane, think about it. We know very little about our brain, about ourselves. Are you really here right now, reading my blog post? You could be dreaming, who are you? Who am I? How do you know? Such conversations could go on about any topic, you could infinitely try to break things down by asking why and how, it will come to a point where the question becomes unanswerable.

Personally I think that it makes some sense to call reality and the physical world into question, but it’s completely ineffective and non-beneficial (unless it amuses you to believe such things). There are some situations where this may work, you could be skeptical about whether or not someone stole your pen, and until they show you enough evidence to disprove your suspicion, you may remain skeptical. Now sometimes I find philosophy frustrating because answering one question leads to another question that is more perplexing. As I was thinking about skepticism I thought “how do we know when to stop being skeptical” or “how do we know we have enough evidence”.  It really would make no sense to doubt everything simply because you can, so that means you must be able to trust to a certain level. So if someone says “your shirt is yellow” and you get all skeptical saying something like “how do you know you aren’t color blind, how do you know I’m even here right now. How do you know you’re not dreaming” so on.. You’ve got to just believe in reality in my opinion because the world might get a little out of hand if we begin to doubt the existence and presence of everything in it… so yeah, philosophy, a very confusing subject.