The History of Scepticism From Savonarola to Bayle [Paperback]

This is a thoroughly revised and expanded edition of Richard Popkin's classicThe History of Scepticism, first published in 1960, revised in 1979, and since translated into numerous foreign languages.

This authoritative work of historical scholarship has been revised throughout, including new material on: the introduction of ancient skepticism into Renaissance Europe; the role of Savonarola and his disciples in bringing Sextus Empiricus to the attention of European thinkers; and new material on Henry More, Blaise Pascal, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, G.W. Leibniz, Simon Foucher and Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Pierre Bayle. The bibliography has also been updated.

1. The Intellectual Crisis of the Reformation
2. The Revival of Greek Scepticism in the Sixteenth Century
3. Michel de Montaigne and the Nouveaux Pyrrhoniens
4. The Influence of the New Pyrrhonism
5. The Libertins Erudits
6. The Counter-Attack Begins
7. Constructive or Mitigated Scepticism
8. Herbert of Cherbury and Jean de Silhon
9. Descartes: Conqueror of Scepticism
10. Descartes: Sceptique Malgr? Lui
11. Some Spiritual and Religious Answers to Scepticism and Descartes: Henry More, Blaise Pascal and the Quietists
12. Political and Practical Answers to Scepticism: Thomas Hobbes
13. Philosophers of the Royal Society: Wilkins, Boyle, and Glanvill
14. Biblical Criticism and the Beginnings of Religious Scepticism
15. Spinoza's Scepticism and Anti-Scepticism
16. Scepticism and Late Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics
17. The New Sceptics: Simon Foucher and Pierre Daniel Huet
18. Pierre Bayle: Super-Scepticism and the Beginnings of the Enlightenment Dogmatism

One of the aspects that makes Popkin's book (and his work in general) of special value is its taking into consideration major and minor thinkers whose views are not well-known. --Phil. Jahrbuch

I regard it as one of the seminal books in the histl]