Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 15, Issue 5/6, 2005

Kinds of an Ways to Wisdom

Wisdom as Epistemological Utopia and Scepticism

In this essay I wish to discuss the notions of utopia, especially the notion of epistemological utopia as Leszek Kołakowski described it in one of his paper. Epistemological utopia is not tantamount to the conception of perfect and unalterable knowledge. On the contrary, in its realm there is also a place for scepticism, because scepticism is a kind of epistemological utopia but à rebours. Epistemological fundamentalism and scepticism are indeed two opposite attitudes but they finally belong to each other. Nevertheless, no one from these attitudes satisfy our epistemological theory. Bertrand Russell described similar situation in his short essay titled On optimism: we can accept at most together pessimist and optimist, never only one of them. Therefore that situation provides to the necessity of overcoming theoretical field of these two, foundational and sceptical, conceptions. In this article I use Wittgenstein’s ideas to search for a ‘new’ epistemological attitude.