Journal of the History of Philosophy

Richard Popkin’s seminal study on the revival of skepticism from the late Renaissance onwards gave a prominent role to Pyrrhonism, rediscovered through the translation of Sextus Empiricus’s writings into Latin and their usage in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, among other works. Maia Neto’s new book aims to reassess this interpretation, claiming that Montaigne’s disciple, Pierre Charron, in his La sagesse, displayed a distinctively Academic skeptical wisdom that became central in the philosophical debate of the period (5). Such wisdom, according to Maia Neto, is conceived as refraining from “opinion” as a way of avoiding error, and thereby arriving at “intellectual integrity,” that is, human perfection insofar as it can be achieved (5–12). In support, he considers four examples of philosophers who took this as a philosophical model either to be followed (Pierre Gassendi and François La Mothe le Vayer) or to be rejected (René Descartes and Blaise Pascal), each considered in a dedicated chapter.

In recent scholarship, this is the first effort at a more systematic consideration of aspects of Charron’s influence. As I cannot here consider each individual essay in detail (they are helpfully summarized in the book’s conclusion), I will proceed to a brief overall discussion. First, what kind of “Charronian legacy” should we recognize within its pages? The work offers many interesting textual comparisons and interpretative hypotheses in a concise way, well-informed by recent scholarship. It provides good support for the more general claim that Academic skepticism, as it was transmitted by Cicero and other ancient sources, reappeared in the philosophical debate at least since Omer Talon’s Academica as an intellectual practice, and was well represented in the work of Charron (21). Further, the fact that La sagesse was printed more times than Montaigne’s Essais (2) is highlighted to suggest that it may have contributed more to diffusing skeptical ideas.

However, those who would here expect the presentation of a Charronian legacy seen as an original contribution to the philosophical debate should proceed with caution. Usually, Charron’s book is taken as a non-original composition almost entirely made up of fragments borrowed from Montaigne. But Montaigne himself is mentioned by all four of the philosophers considered by Maia Neto, just as much as Charron is, and often in connection with him. In his analysis, Maia Neto often acknowledges where Charron is following Montaigne, but sometimes neglects to indicate similar parallels in strategic points of his argument. For instance, Maia Neto considers a manuscript in which Pascal made remarks on dealing with “the divisions of Charron, which are boring and sad,” and goes on to compare passages from Pascal with others from La sagesse, suggesting that Pascal is using Charron’s work (130–32). However, the argument seems inconclusive since all the passages from Pascal considered in these pages could also be compared with other of Montaigne’s texts. Again, when Maia Neto considers Gassendi’s conception of “paradox”—just to mention another example—he argues for the existence of a connection with Charron’s method without taking into account that Gassendi’s strategy exemplifies a stylistic form widespread during the Renaissance, and also employed by Montaigne. [End Page 163]

Maia Neto explicitly points to what he claims to be original features of La sagesse, but these features are too subtle, or they are not clearly connected with Charron’s reception by the particular philosophers examined. He rightly stresses how La sagesse, unlike Montaigne’s Essais, is wholly conceived as a pædagogical tool (18). Also, he contrasts the way Charron conceived his skeptical wisdom as distinctively “Academic” insofar as he aimed at practical certainty, rejecting Pyrrhonism as an “incertitude douteuse et fluctuante”; while Montaigne, distinguishing both currents, praises “a doubt which applies to itself” (33–38).

Here there is room for discussion about the historical meaning of ‘Academic’ wisdom in...