Introduction

Abstract

There can be no doubt that the recent historiography of Renaissance and early modern scepticism had, as its founding fathers, Richard H. Popkin and Charles B. Schmitt. It may be said that, thanks to their writings, we contemporary scholars have regained knowledge of the importance of scepticism in the formation of European thought. For the first great philosophical historians at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this awareness was already an acquired heritage, but it had been nearly lost after the Enlightenment, and even more particularly in the nineteenth century. To find treatises that are comparable in importance and intensity, despite the different standards applied, we must go back as far to some articles in Bayle's Dictionnaire, after that to Brucker's monumental Historia critica and Reimman's Historia universalis atheismi, and, at the end of the eighteenth century, to Stäudlin's Geschichte und Geist des Skepticismus. As well as producing an admirable monograph on ancient Pyrrhonian scepticism, which he clearly distinguished from that of the Academics, Brucker included in his Historia a section on the “modern sceptics” which, alongside Huet, Bayle, Gassendi and Glanvill, also dealt with Montaigne, Sanchez, Charron, Hirnhaym and La Mothe Le Vayer. Reimman investigated the doubtful view that writers of the Italian and French Renaissance — from Boccaccio to Postel, from Machiavelli to B. des Périers, and even Campanella —were sceptics and irreligious.1 After the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth, thinkers were not unaware of scepticism's importance for philosophy as the treatment of doubt in Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes or Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus clearly show. It was only in the limited sphere of the historiography of philosophy that scepticism seems to have lost the appeal and the central place it had retained during the previous three centuries. This fact alone clearly illustrates the situation in which, starting from the 1960s, Popkin and Schmitt found themselves working. They had, indeed, to recreate the object of their studies ex novo, following the canons of recent historical research, rounding out and giving visibility to a movement that, throughout the development of historiography, had been relegated to a shadowy and marginal place compared to the great figures of the “dogmatists,” on which early modern philosophy had concentrated.