Ian Ramsey Centre: The Great Debate

This lecture begins the account of the sceptics who appealed to the common working man, with the main focus of this first lecture on Thomas Paine, with responses by Bishop Richard Watson.

This second and final lecture on urbane scepticism deals with the work of the Utilitarian John Stuart Mill and the English poet Matthew Arnold.

Urbane scepticism, an extension of English Deism, is presented in this lecture mostly through the lens of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with a response by Bishop Richard Watson.

The focus of this lecture is continental scepticism, primarily a French movement influenced by Deism, and its main proponents: Voltaire and Rousseau.

This lecture introduces the course and the seven sceptical challenges of the period: continental, urbane, populist, scholarly, transcendental, establishment, and Dutch and German.