The Skeptical Enlightenment

Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason

Bibliographic Data

ID16579774
AuthorsBryan A Banks (Columbus State University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume33
Issue4
Pages636-637
Publication date2019-12-31
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrench History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0269-1191 • E-ISSN: 1477-4542
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/fh/crz102
OpenAlexW2989886082
LanguageEN
Citations received4

Jeffrey Burson and Anton M. Matytsin’s edited volume, entitled The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason, offers both an innovative characterization of the Enlightenment as well as a sharp critique of the debates surrounding the ‘nature, coherence, and periodization’ of the intellectual age as, ‘like skepticism itself, ... fundamentally unresolvable and of increasingly esoteric interest’. The editors of the volume offer a paradigmatic definition of the Enlightenment that relies not on facile understandings of reason à la Thomas Paine, but rather on the problems presented by, especially Pyrrhonian skepticism. ‘Philosophical skepticism, far more than certainty and the glib assumption of inevitable progress, was, in fact, the crucible of the Enlightenment process itself’, the editors in the introduction argue. In addition to the introduction, the volume consists of eight chapters that episodically trace the rise of skepticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its eventual fizzling out in the late eighteenth century, as Enlightenment philosophers and revolutionary thinkers carved out an epistemological middle ground between absolute dogmatism and skepticism that we broadly refer to as reason. This arch is the most important organizing principle of the volume. Each contribution shows just how prevalent and diverse skepticism was in the period.

Certainty · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Skepticism · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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