"Self-evident" in the sense that they don't need any starting assumptions whatsoever. The point I am making repeatedly because others don't seem to get it is that if there is no way to justify the premise that the world exists without resort to assumptions, then we're no better than the people who believe in God on faith.
I am searching for a way to deal with the Evil Demon Argument etc. for that reason. As for said philosophers, they have a different concept of a self from Descartes and so to an extent are talking about different things.
if there is no way to justify the premise that the world exists without resort to assumptions, then we're no better than the people who believe in God on faith.
Let us imagine two people. One believes "on faith" that (1) what their senses tell them has some correlation with how things really are, (2) their memory has some correlation with the past, and (3) their reasoning isn't completely random and broken. The other believes "on faith" those three things, and also that every statement in a certain collection of ancient documents is ...
I've raised arguments for philosophical scepticism before, which have mostly been argued against in a Popper-esque manner of arguing that even if we don't know anything with certainty, we can have legitimate knowledge on probabilities.
The problem with this, however, is how you answer a sceptic about the notion of probability having a correlation with reality. Probability depends upon axioms of probability- how are said axioms to be justified? It can't be by definition, or it has no correlation to reality.