Introduction: What Is Enlightenment Scepticism? A Critical Rereading of Richard Popkin

Abstract

Richard Popkin’s first works devoted to scepticism in the Enlightenment make it look as if the eighteenth century had no concern for sceptical texts. With the exception of Hume, who is presented as the only true sceptic of the Enlightenment, Popkin believes that eighteenth century thinkers were primarily defenders of experimental science and theoreticians of a continuous progress in knowledge. Thus, in this view, scepticism was, at best, a methodological tool enabling a richer scientific research, or, at worst, a philosophical stand now completely refuted due to its practical absurdity. In his later works, Popkin nuanced this caricatural position thanks to his reading of historians of early modern philosophy such as Ezequiel de Olaso, Giorgio Tonelli, or Keith Baker. However, he never totally refuted his initial hypothesis that scepticism was not essential to the Enlightenment. In this paper, I shall come back to Popkin’s arguments and explore various aspects of eighteenth century scepticism that he did not know of in order to offer a fairer evaluation of the importance of scepticism in the Enlightenment.