L’articulation du scepticisme religieux et du scepticisme profane dans l’Histoire du scepticisme d’Érasme à Spinoza, de Richard H. Popkin

The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza by Richard H. Popkin is not just an account of various sceptical doctrines of the 16th and 17th centuries: a thread gives the whole a coherence. In fact, a general conception of modern philosophy underlies his analyses. According to Popkin, philosophy, from the Renaissance to the Englightenment, was faced with the difficulty of overcoming the sceptical crisis which was born in the context of a religious quarrel and which quickly spread to all other intellectual fields. Thus, Popkins gives an original interpretation of modernity, an interpretation that can be questionned nevertheless in so far as he does not make a clear enough distinction between modern and ancient scepticism and does not take into account the specificity of fideism.