THE SKEPTICAL PHRASES

REINOSO, GUADALUPE

Natal

Encuentro; VII INTERNATIONAL MEETING ON SKEPTICISM; 2018

In Contributions to a Critique of Language (1903), Fritz Mauthner presents his commitment to a nontheoretical, Pyrrhonian, style of skepticism. Even so, he also wrote that skeptics have, in their fight against philosophical dogmatism, ??again and again become negative dogmatists even though they wanted to remain critics? (Cf. Sluga 2004: p. 102). For Mauthner, as for Kant, the mission of philosophy is a critique of the conditions of possibility of our knowledge, but this criticism is now understood as a critique of language (Sprachkritik). However, at the center of Mauthner?s thought, stands the conviction that language is an ultimately unsatisfactory tool for philosophical thought because language creates superstitions. Philosophy must fight against and resist this linguistic seduction. Consequently, the final purpose of philosophy must be a freeing from words, from the tyranny of language: ??the critique of language must teach liberation from language as the highest goal of self-liberation?? (1.713), (Cf. Sluga 2004, p. 103).