Anton M. Matytsin. The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment

Anton M. Matytsin’s book about epistemological issues in the Enlightenment, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, is a further extension through modern philosophy of Richard Popkin’s groundbreaking research published in The History of Scepticism—first from Erasmus to Descartes (1960), then from Erasmus to Spinoza (1979), and finally from Savonarola to Bayle (2003). Matytsin begins at the point in the history of ideas where Popkin finished his last edition. Here, Matytsin shows that what Popkin called the crise pyrrhonienne of the second half of the sixteenth century and of the early seventeenth century, which, according to him, was crucial for the whole development of modern philosophy, continued during the first decades of the eighteenth century not only in Catholic France but also in the French-speaking Huguenot diaspora in other European countries. The title of the book describes its first part (“The Spectrum of Anti-Skepticism”). Matytsin shows how the publication of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) provoked a widespread and fierce antiskeptical reaction. Despite Bayle’s alleged fideism, his radical skepticism was mostly perceived as a major threat to Christianity, in particular by Protestant writers, because many Catholics thought that attacks on the rational basis of religion indirectly justified tradition and authority as the major foundations of Christian faith. Matytsin shows that, contrary to a common view of the Enlightenment, the effort of religiously minded authors was important to defending reason against the threat of extreme skepticism. Bayle was the main but not the only skeptical specter to haunt apologists. In the first part of the book, Matytsin also includes chapters on similar receptions to the first translation of Sextus Empiricus’s Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes into French in 1725 (chap. 5, 110–130) and to Pierre-Daniel Huet’s posthumous (1723) Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain (chapter 4, 94–109). The latter caused scandal, and even had its authorship questioned, because Huet was an erudite major bishop who had published a Demonstratio Evangelica (1679). Matytsin carefully examines critical reviews of these skeptical books—in the case of Bayle’s Dictionary, he also looks at a number of “Anti-Dictionnaire Projects” (83–91)—which appeared at the time in various journals and books, in particular Jean-Pierre Crousaz’s Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et moderne (1733). The diffusion of the antiskeptical debate in the vernacular to a much wider public, in particular through these journals, made the crise pyrrhonienne of the early eighteenth century even more significant than that of the early seventeenth.

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