Skepsis. Le débat des modernes sur le scepticisme. Montaigne, Le Vayer, Campanella, Hobbes, Descartes, Bayle (review)

The countryside around what Bayle called "the high road of pyrrhonism" has been often explored in the last fifty years. Richard Popkin (1923–2005) was the first cartographer to draw a map when he published the History of Scepticism in 1960. Against Busson's view of scepticism as a variant of irreligion (see his 1933 book, La pensée religieuse française de Charron à Pascal), Popkin provided a more subtle interpretation, where scepticism is a via media between atheism and religion—a third way, akin to fideism. Later, Popkin came to distinguish between pyrrhonian scepticism (often of a scientific sort) and a scepticism "coming from heaven" based on divine omnipotence and situated in a theological perspective. Discussions of scepticism during the past decade have often been limited to historiographical debates that quickly produced controversial interpretations. Well aware of this recent trend, Gianni Paganini proposes a new reading of modern scepticism, which he uses to explore modern philosophy and define its major issues.

Paganini himself contributed to the historiographical debate in his valuable edition (with G. Canziani) of the Theophrastus redivivus (1981), as well as in numerous edited collections. The present volume contains nine papers originally given as lectures and now carefully rewritten and enlarged for publication. Each of the six chapters revolves around a precise argument, often original and always stimulating.

Everything begins with Montaigne, who in fantasie reassesses the sceptical doctrine of the phenomenon: la fantasie et apparence n'est pas du sujet, ains seulement de la passion et souffrance du sens (Essais II, XII, ed. Villey, 601). Through a detailed examination of Henri Estienne's Latin translation of the Hypotyposes, Paganini shows how 'apparentia' serves to translate the Greek 'phainomena'. Montaigne avoids the technical term, but borrows his translation from the lexicon of appearance, giving to posterity the Sextian phenomenon and not the Pyrrhonian "appearance."

La Mothe Le Vayer remains enigmatic. Although he certainly "added a libertine development to Montaigne's scepticism" (S. Giocanti), this cannot be separated from the status of religious orthodoxy in the mid-seventeenth century, especially in the Gallican areas. To mention Foscarini (who had been condemned by the Roman Inquisition) was not very risky in France, where non viget Index Romanus (the Roman Index does not apply). The pious Seguier, Chancellor of the Kingdom of France, did not hesitate to publish in 1636 a manuscript written in 1580 by his grandfather, Pierre Seguier, defending the salvation of heathens. Antoine Arnauld wrote a refutation (published posthumously in 1701) simultaneously aimed at Seguier, La Mothe Le Vayer, and Father Sirmond. For the young theologian of Port-Royal, they were all guilty of claiming that one does not have to believe in Jesus Christ to be saved; thus, a pious statesman, the preceptor of the King, and a learned Jesuit all shared the concept of a Universalist Christianity! Paganini is cautious about the concept of sceptique chrétienne, insisting that it must be linked to what orthodoxy meant then. It was a concept in progress, built up by successive condemnations of errors by the Roman magisterium. Practical theology developed very slowly and did not entail a rigid orthodoxy until the end of the century.

The second important claim in the present volume is that scepticism has been fruitful even for "dogmatic" philosophers such as Campanella, Mersenne, and Descartes. In the last few years, Italian historians of philosophy have worked to rehabilitate Campanella. In his (too) many books, Campanella absorbed the culture of his time: the first book of his Universalis philosophia (which includes his Metaphysica) deals with sceptical arguments, but it was published only in 1638, and seen as outdated by readers of the more recent Discours de la méthode. Paganini convincingly shows that Mersenne ruthlessly (and literally) borrowed the sceptical arguments he refutes in La vérité des sciences (1625) from Campanella. But his refutation is weaker than that of the Calabrese monk because...