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I gave my first university lecture in philosophy at the University of Ghana, Legon, when I was a freshly credentialed 21-year-old. My audience was a couple of hundred students gathered in a vast hall, with ceiling fans to move the hot and humid air. Above the murmur of the fans and the muttering of students, I tried to explain why Descartes thought the mere possibility that there was an Evil Demon deceiving their senses meant they couldn’t know for sure that I was really there. Ah, Cartesian skepticism! I remember diagraming the structure of the argument in huge chalk letters on an enormous blackboard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/what-is-the-point-of-college.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1 The New York Times