An Uneasy Relationship: Atheism and Scepticism in the Late French Enlightenment

Abstract

At first glance, the materialistic atheism of the late French Enlightenment appears philosophically dogmatic and wholly incompatible with philosophical scepticism. A closer examination of the works of Denis Diderot, the baron d’Holbach, and Jacques-André Naigeon, however, reveals that at their seemingly most dogmatic moments, they reflected significantly on “the weakness of the human mind” in ways that had important sceptical consequences. More importantly, when they examined the status of their own propositions, they concluded on behalf both of the impossibility of philosophical demonstration of their own foundational assumptions and of the impossibility of changing, in the ways they would have desired, the thinking and the behavior of the human species.