Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

This volume deals with scepticism and irreligion in the 17th and 18th century. The various contributions seek to clarify and to understand the challenges made then to both the framework of thinking about God and religion and the intellectual systems that had supported religious thinking. Ample attention is given to early modern interpretations of ancient Pyrrhonism and also to biblical criticism.Contributors: Richard Popkin, Introduction.Sylvia Murr, Gassendi's scepticism as a religious attitude.Theo Verbeek, From learned ignorance to scepticism: Descartes and Calvinist orthodoxy.Richard A. Watson, Descartes' scepticism.Ezequiel de Olaso, Hobbes: religion and ideology.Alan Gabbey, A disease incurable: Scepticism and the Cambridge Platonists.Susanna Ekerman, The answer to scepticism of Queen Christina's academy.Sarah Hutton, Science, philosophy, and atheism: Edward Stillingfleet's defence of religion.Ernestine van der Wall, Orthodoxy and scepticism in the early Dutch enlightenment.David S. Katz, Isaac Vossius and the English biblical critics 1650-1689.Alan Charles Kors, Skepticism and the problem of atheism in early-modern France.Silvia Berti, Scepticism and the Traiti des trois imposteurs.Ruth Whelan, The wisdom of Simonides: Bayle and La Mothe Le Vayer.Harry M. Bracken, Bayle's attack on natural theology.Lothar Kreimendahl, Das Theodizeeproblem und Bayles fideistischer Lvsungsversuch.James E. Force, Biblical interpretation, Newton and English Deism.Olivier Bloch, Scepticisme et religion dans la Riponse un thiologien du midecin Gaultier et sa posteriti clandestine.Constance Blackwell, Diogenes Laertius'sLife of Pyrrho and the interpretation of ancient scepticism in the history of philosophy: Stanley through Brucker to Tennemann.