Description
Book SynopsisThis complex and engaging book offers a powerful new explanation of how Enlightenment thinkers came to understand the purposes and the boundaries of rational inquiry.
Trade Review. . . enriching study of previously neglected sources of epistemological transformation during the Enlightenment ear. Matytsin's work uncovers a dialectical pathway in which interchanges between skeptics and their opponents formed a new conception of reason, sufficiently modest to have relinquished metaphysics, but sufficiently bold to motivate the encyclopedists' expansive ambitions, and to play a formative role in establishing the modern disciplinary structure of knowledge.
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The Eighteenth-Century IntelligencerThe Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment is an admirable exercise in intellectual history, free of the assumption that the Enlightenment has, by definition, to be shown to be the origins of the modern secular liberal world.
—James A. Harris, University of St. Andrews,
Journal of Modern HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: The "Age of Reason" and the Specter of Skepticism Part 1: The Spectrum of Anti-Skepticism Chapter 1: The Walking Ignorant: The Skeptical "Epidemic" in the Eighteenth Century Chapter 2: Pierre Bayle- Bete Noire and the Elusive Skeptic Chapter 3: The Specter of Bayle Returns to Haunt France Chapter 4: Secret Skepticism: Huet's Fideistic Fumbles Chapter 5: A New Hope: The Critics of Pyrrhonism Strike Back Chapter 6: The Berlin Compromise: Mitigated Skepticism and Probability Part II: Disciplining Doubt Chapter 7: Matter over mind: Dualism, Materialism, and Skepticism in Eighteenth-Century Epistemology Chapter 8: A Matter of Debate: Conceptions of Material Substance in the "Scientific Revolution"Chapter 9: War of the Worlds: Cartesian Vortices and Newtonian Gravitation in Eighteenth-Century Astronomy Chapter 10: Historical Pyrrhonism and its Discontents Conclusion Bibliography Notes Index
