Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy

José R. Maia Neto is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He has published Machado de Assis, The Brazilian Pyrrhonian (Purdue U. P., 1994) and The Christianization of Pyrrhonism: skepticism and faith in Pascal, Kierkegaard and Shestov (Kluwer, 1995). With Richard H. Popkin, he edited Skepticism in Renaissance and Post-Renaissance Thought (Humanity Books, 2004) and Skepticism: an anthology (Prometheus Books, 2007). With Gianni Paganini, he edited Renaissance Scepticisms (Springer, 2009) and with Paganini and John Christian Laursen, Skepticism in The Modern Age: building on the work of Richard Popkin (Brill, 2009). He has published many articles and chapters on early modern skepticism in English, French and Portuguese.

"In recent scholarship, this is the first effort at a more systematic consideration of aspects of Charron's influence. ... The work offers many interesting textual comparisons and interpretative hypotheses in a concise way, well-informed by recent scholarship. It provides good support for the more general claim that Academic skepticism ... ." (Luiz Eva, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 55 (1), January, 2017)

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Charron’s Academic Skeptical Wisdom.- Chapter 3: Gassendi’s Attack on Dogmatic Science.- Chapter 4: La Mothe Le Vayer’s Attack on Belief and Superstition.- Chapter 5: Descartes’s Rehabilitation of Science.- Chapter 6: Pascal’s Rehabilitation of Christian Faith.- Chapter 7: Conclusion.- Bibliography.- Index Nominum.