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Abstract: Skepticism is a central aspect of our intellectual heritage, even if many of us do not recognize it. Only in recent decades has the intellectual archeology been done that enables to see this part of our heritage and its role in how we came to think the way we do. Gianni Paganini's Skepsis. Le debat des modernes sur le scepticisme (2008) is the most important recent work in this archeology, bringing out the role of early modern thinkers from Montaigne to Bayle in the development of the contemporary world view. Some of these thinkers helped us accept and learn to live with skepticism, such as Montaigne and Bayle. Others, such as Campanella and Descartes, thought they could refute skepticism, but their encounters with it accomplished two things: one, bringing skeptical arguments to the attention of the philosophical world, and two, giving skepticism renewed life by their failures to refute it. All of this is great background to understanding what Barack Obama means when he calls himself a skeptic.
Many people today are fundamentally skeptics, even if they do not know it. It may seem like a paradox to suggest that people might not know how they think, but it is all too common. One thinks that one thinks in the only possible way to think, but it turns out that there are many different ways of thinking. Up to a certain point, one can choose among them. If you understand the philosophical underpinnings of yours and other ways of thinking, you both have a better understanding of your own thinking plus have some control over it. But you cannot tinker with and adjust your way of thinking if you do not even know what it is.
So we need an archeology of ideas which tells us where they came from, and an anatomy that tells us how they work. That is part of what the history of philosophy does. And Skepsis. Le débat des modernes sur le scepticisme by Gianni Paganini1 provides us with an archaeology and anatomy of skepticism, that pervasive element of the modern way of thinking.
This archeology and anatomy require going back to the writings of influential thinkers who participated in the transition from the ancient and medieval...