The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Skepticism as a Way of Life

Come join the Philly Stoa as we open a new series on How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic. In preparation for the sessions ahead, we'll be drawing on the work of Massimo Pigliucci, beginning with his Psyche essay "These lessons in scepticism could make the world a better place." His starting point is a paradox worth sitting with: in a time when critical thinking is taught everywhere, our public life has rarely been more crowded with rigid certainties and loyalty to shaky "facts." In an age where certainty is currency, doubt has become a radical act. This session asks what it would mean to treat that doubt not as weakness but as a discipline worth cultivating.

The word skeptic comes from the Greek skeptikos, meaning inquirer, and Pigliucci introduces four ancient figures who each modeled a different way of inquiring well. Socrates shows the strange wisdom of knowing how little…