Suspension of judgement undeniably has a very rich history in philosophy. It emerges in the Stoics’ discussions of the possibility of knowledge. It is central to Sextus Empiricus’s Pyrrhonian views and is obviously closely related to doubt, which plays a crucial role in Descartes’ theory of knowledge. Strikingly, however, suspension of judgement has received little attention in the intense epistemological debates of the past fifty years. The aim of this project is to remedy this situation and to demonstrate how fruitful the study of suspension of judgement is for contemporary epistemology by exploring the nature and normativity of suspension of belief. The project is thus divided into two parts, a descriptive and a normative one. The first tries to give an account of the metaphysical nature of suspension of judgement. The second investigates the specific normativity of suspension of judgement specifically in comparison to belief.

The project on suspension of judgement is led by Prof. Dr. Anne Meylan and Dr. Benoit Gaultier at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and started in September 2020 at the University of Zurich.