Genia Schӧnbaumsfeld is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton who specializes in Epistemology, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Religion. She is the author of The Illusion of Doubt, forthcoming with Oxford University Press later this year, and of A Confusion of the Spheres – Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, also with Oxford UP (2007). In her new book she argues that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of one’s evidential situation, which, once undermined, makes available to one a ‘realism without empiricism’ that allows unmediated contact with the objects and persons in one’s environment which an appearance of doubt had threatened to put forever beyond one’s cognitive grasp.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Schӧnbaumsfeld's talk - 'Beliefs-in-a-Vat' - at the Aristotelian Society on 6 February 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.