SKÉPSIS, ISSN 1981-4194, ANO VII, Nº 14, 2016, p. 100-125. TAKING SKEPTICISM SERIOUSLY: STROUD AND CAVELL JÔNADAS TECHIO Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) Email: jonadas.techio@ufrgs.br Abstract Analytic philosophers tend to see skepticism as at best an intellectual game designed to introduce technical problems in their areas. In the opposite direction, Barry Stroud and Stanley Cavell have been trying to convince us of the seriousness or significance, or even the truth in skepticism. That does not mean that they are willing to accept the skeptical conclusions, at least not in the way both the skeptic and her critics interpret them; rather, their task is to provide a reassessment of the whole debate, avoiding to extract negative conclusions prematurely, thus missing the chance of learning what skepticism, if well understood, has to teach about our condition. Affinities notwithstanding, Stroud suspects that Cavell's own engagement with skepticism has failed to live up to those methodological requirements. There are two main lines of criticism supporting that suspicion which I intend to reconstruct and counteract in this paper: (1) Cavell wants to show that some of the skeptic's "claims" are nonsensical, but in order to achieve that verdict he assumes a theory about the conditions of sense which is not explicitly developed and supported in his writings; (2) Cavell proposes an alternative view of our relations to the world and other minds which is supposed to be immune to skeptical threats, but again he fails to offer a satisfactory account of that relation. I shall argue that both criticisms miss their target, and are predicated upon narrow (if natural) construals of distinctive Cavellian devices. Ultimately I want to show that Stroud has not fully taken to heart Cavell's point about skepticism being not exactly or merely an epistemological problem in need of a theoretical (dis)solution, but rather an intellectualization of our disappointment with our finite condition. This, I take it, does not affect in any direct way Stroud's own approach to the skeptical problematic, but it might indicate that it does not go as deep in probing our human plight as Cavell's go.