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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Critique of Marxist Philosophy (part 1) Skepticism Modern skepticism has its progenitor in the post-Aristotelian Greek school of skepticism headed by Pyrrho (b.c. 360 B.C.). It did not confine itself to showing the contradictions of sense perception but went on to an analysis of knowledge to assert the impossibility of certainty.

Hume took Locke's and Berkeley's empiricism to its logical conclusion by throwing doubt on causality and induction and abolished the distinction between rational belief and credulity. Not only God but also the self, other minds and external reality fell prey to a skepticism based on the denial of the principle of causality, which was again based on the empirical theory of knowledge. Hume's explanation of causality, as pointed out before, is unsuccessful.

Relativism: Relativism, in the context of metaphysics and epistemology, is, according to al-Sadr, a doctrine which asserts the existence of independent reality and the possibility of knowledge, but a relative knowledge that is not free from subjective attachments. Hence the author proposes to discuss certain main relativistic tendencies, beginning with Kant's philosophy. Kant's 'Relativism': Kant believes that propositions are of two kinds: analytic and synthetic.

An analytic proposition is one in which the predicate is part of the subject; for instance, 'The triangle is three-sided'. The synthetic propositions are those which are not analytic; they give new information. Propositions are also distinguishable into two other kinds: a priori and empirical. A priori judgements, though they may be elicited by experience, have a basis other than experience, unlike empirical judgements which are rooted in experience. Some a priori judgements are synthetic.

All the propositions of pure mathematics are a priori in this sense. The propositions of sciences are synthetic and empirical. Kant believes space and time to be formal attributes of the perceiving subject which give a special and temporal structure to all experience. He agrees with Berkeley that matter is not given in knowledge and sense experience, but disagrees with him in holding that external reality cannot exist independently of mind.

Things independent of mind, the things-in-themselves, do exist. Percepts are caused by things in themselves and are ordered by our mental apparatus in space and time.