Chapter 8 - Skepticism

Summary

This chapter examines one moment in Shakespeare—from As You Like It—in which Shakespeare might be said to play with skeptical, Pyrrhonist principles: in which opposed positions seem to have lodged themselves within a character. The chapter explores what can happen to philosophical, in this case Pyrrhonist, notions when they are not articulated by characters themselves and are instead embodied in performance; when the character who embodies those notions is not a particularly philosophical character at all; and when philosophical notions are not only performed but also transformed by the passions which Pyrrhonists would curb and without which Shakespeare’s plays would be intolerably boring. Addressing these questions, the chapter considers the form that virtue can take when it arises not as a consequence of, but in the absence of, a philosophy.