Comments by "Mark Pawelek" (@mark4asp) on "Philosophy for Beginners" video.
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I, maybe, disagree on your choice of "Beyond Good and Evil", I'd picked "The Geneology of Morals" instead. Thanks for the list. Some appealing books there which I wouldn't otherwise look at.
I think debate and logic are mostly practice. It's very hard to exclude bad logic such as fallacies because one has to entirely exclude common sense thought - given what a bad example the media set - that cannot be easy for the average person today.
Re: Skeptics. Pagden goes into that in detail. I think there are 3 big movements in Skepticism: Greek, Enlightenment and Postmodernism. Ancient Greek Skepticism was indeed radically skeptical. But it died with Western Philosophy when Justinian closed the non-Christian, Athenian schools. Skepticism ware reborn with The Englightenment and, from the first day, it had a new target. Englightenment was skeptical of the Christian Aristolean tradition of Natual Law. Englightenment thinkers nearly always defered to empirical facts - although sometimes, as in Rousseau, they made their "facts" up.
The workd "skeptical" re-entered US thought largely due to the work of Michael Schermer (who isn't, stricktly, even a philosopher, but does teach a course on Skepticism 101) Yet prior to Schermer: Postmodernism had already repainted modern thought with a deeply skeptical brush. Postmodernist skepticism seems, to me, to go back in time to the radicalism of the Ancient Greeks - in a shared contempt for the real. It's also radically Anti-Western, Postmodernism could also be seen as a 2nd go at the Enlightenment, but targetting the West (as avidly as most of the Enlightenment has targetted Natural Law); and also having a sisterhood of victims in contrast to Enlightenment's Cosmopolitanism of Equals.
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