The Rebirth of Pyrrhonism in Hume’s Time (and Before)

Abstract

The revival of Pyrrhonism in Western Europe was facilitated by Latin translations of the work of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century, and further promoted by Michel Montaigne who brought scepticism to the forefront of philosophical interest. Ancient Pyrrhonism began to subvert all the established dogmas as a matter of principle and was thus a fuse that accelerated both the decline of scholastics and the formation of the new position based on the confident self. After all, even though scepticism was a destructive method, based on subversive arguments concerning the reliability of our senses and reason, these arguments had their source in man’s own ability to think. Pyrrhonian scepticism found a fertile ground in France, in the works of natural philosophers like Pierre Gassendi and Samuel Sorbière and, in the next generation, Pierre-Daniel Huet and Simon Foucher. They accepted the fact that Pyrrhonism could not be defeated and tried to find some operational space for science within its framework by replacing the ideal of certainty of knowledge by probability and in calling for modesty in our knowledge claims. Hume drew on these ideas but proposed a more radical, unmitigated form of scepticism inspired by Bayle.