The specter of skepticism in the age of enlightenment

The specter of skepticism in the age of enlightenment

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

xi, 361 p. ; 24 cm.

190.9 M446 2016

(OCoLC)951171715

The ancient Greek philosophy of Pyrrhonian skepticism spread across a wide spectrum of disciplines in the 1600s, casting a shadow over the European learned world. The early modern skeptics expressed doubt concerning the existence of an objective reality independent of human perception. They also questioned long-standing philosophical assumptions and, at times, undermined the foundations of political, moral, and religious authorities. How did eighteenth-century scholars overcome this skeptical crisis of confidence to usher in the so-called Age of Reason? In The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, Anton Matytsin describes how skeptical rhetoric forced philosophers to formulate the principles and assumptions that they found to be certain or, at the very least, highly probable. In attempting to answer the deep challenge of philosophical skepticism, these thinkers explicitly articulated the rules for attaining true and certain knowledge and defined the boundaries beyond which human understanding could not venture.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-349) and index.
Contents: The "age of reason" and the specter of skepticism -- The spectrum of anti-skepticism -- The walking ignorant: the skeptical "epidemic" in the eighteenth century -- Pierre Bayle-Bete Noire and the elusive skeptic -- The specter of Bayle returns to haunt France -- Secret skepticism: Huet's fideistic fumbles -- A new hope: the critics of Pyrrhonism strike back -- The Berlin compromise: mitigated skepticism and probability -- Disciplining doubt -- Matter over mind: dualism, materialism, and skepticism in eighteenth-century epistemology -- A matter of debate: conceptions of material substance in the "scientific revolution" -- War of the worlds: Cartesian vortices and Newtonian gravitation in eighteenth-century astronomy -- Historical Pyrrhonism and its discontents.
L2016M170

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