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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
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The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Hardcover)
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The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Hardcover)
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The ancient Greek philosophy of Pyrrhonian skepticism spread across
a wide spectrum of disciplines in the 1600s, casting a shadow over
the European learned world. The early modern skeptics expressed
doubt concerning the existence of an objective reality independent
of human perception. They also questioned long-standing
philosophical assumptions and, at times, undermined the foundations
of political, moral, and religious authorities. How did
eighteenth-century scholars overcome this skeptical crisis of
confidence to usher in the so-called Age of Reason? In The Specter
of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, Anton Matytsin describes
how skeptical rhetoric forced philosophers to formulate the
principles and assumptions that they found to be certain or, at the
very least, highly probable. In attempting to answer the deep
challenge of philosophical skepticism, these thinkers explicitly
articulated the rules for attaining true and certain knowledge and
defined the boundaries beyond which human understanding could not
venture. Matytsin explains the dialectical outcome of the
philosophical disputes between the skeptics and their various
opponents in France, the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, and Prussia.
He shows that these exchanges transformed skepticism by mitigating
its arguments while broadening the learned world's confidence in
the capacities of reason by moderating its aspirations. Ultimately,
the debates about the powers and limits of human understanding led
to the making of a new conception of rationality that privileged
practicable reason over speculative reason. Matytsin also
complicates common narratives about the Enlightenment by
demonstrating that most of the thinkers who defended reason from
skeptical critiques were religiously devout. By attempting either
to preserve or to reconstruct the foundations of their worldviews
and systems of thought, they became important agents of
intellectual change and formulated new criteria of doubt and
certainty. This complex and engaging book offers a powerful new
explanation of how Enlightenment thinkers came to understand the
purposes and the boundaries of rational inquiry.
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