Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance by Michelle Zerba (review)

Taking the reevaluative moves of Nietzsche and Bourdieu as points of departure and some of the best of the last half century of scholarship on antiquity and early modernity as traveling companions, Zerba guides her readers over the heavily trafficked terrain of Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Cicero, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Montaigne in search of the doubleness in Western thinking that we call doubt. The trip is eye-opening, as we revisit an Achilles caught in a “cognitive disruption” experienced as an internal debate that only incompletely and so tragically demystifies itself; a Penelope whose skeptical epoche ensures both her own happiness and the generic expectations of comedy; and a Machiavelli who models his practically panourgic political philosophy on the Academic principles of Cicero’s De oratore. Along the way, in other words, Zerba addresses not just the kinds of doubt that condition these texts but their “strategies of representation, formal techniques, and cultivated attitudes.” At every stop and with every step, we are made to see that doubt practices its “dexterity” in deep and destabilizing ways, shaping the so-called classical literary and philosophical traditions not just in their belated stages but, pace Nietzsche, virtually ab ovo.