RESUMENEl presente artículo examina el análisis efectuado por La Mothe le Vayer acerca del hecho religioso y su problemática en su obra Dialogues faits à l´imitation des anciens. Desde un acusado escepticismo, presenta la religión como una construcción cultural y convencional. La filosofía, en tanto ejercicio de análisis escéptico, ofrecerá una visión de la moral y la religión alejadas por completo de toda sacralizad. Serán, sin embargo, instrumentos muy útiles para el Estado y, si se administran bien, redundarán en la (...) cohesión social y en la pax politica.PALABRAS CLAVEESCEPTICISMO, CONVENCIÓN, RAZÓN DE ESTADOABSTRACTIn this paper we examine the analysis carried out by La Mothe le Vayer of the religious matter and its problems in his work Dialogues faits à l´imitation des anciens. From a marked scepticism, he presents religion as a cultural and conventional entity. Philosophy, as an exercise of sceptical analysis, offers a view of morality and religion totally removed from any sacredness. Both are, however, very useful instruments for the State and, when well administered, beneficial to social cohesion and pax politica.KEY WORDSSCEPTICISM, CONVENTIOM, REASON OF STATE. (shrink)

Writing about the history of science and the history of philosophy involves assumptions about the role of context and about the relationships between past and present ideas. Some historians emphasize the context, concentrating on the intellectual, personal, and social factors that affect the way earlier thinkers have approached their subject. Analytic philosophers take a critical approach, considering the logic and merit of the arguments of past thinkers almost as though they are engaging in contemporary debates. Some philosophers use the ideas (...) of historical figures to support their own philosophical agendas. Scholarly studies of the French natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) exemplify many of these .. (shrink)

En 1627, el funcionario estatal francés Gabriel Naudé escribió un texto titulado _Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque_. El tratado, considerado con frecuencia obra fundacional de la biblioteconomía, pone a la vista ideas muy propias de dos concepciones del conocimiento erudito: la enciclopedística y el escepticismo. El presente trabajo examina las posibles afinidades filosóficas que los dos fenómenos epistemológicos mencionados presentarían en el texto de Naudé, todo ello en el marco del absolutismo francés del siglo XVII.

: Marin Mersenne was central to the new mathematical approach to nature in Paris in the 1630s and 1640s. Intellectually, he was one of the most enthusiastic practitioners of that program, and published a number of influential books in those important decades. But Mersenne started his career in a rather different way. In the early 1620s, Mersenne was known in Paris primarily as a writer on religious topics, and a staunch defender of Aristotle against attacks by those who would replace (...) him by a new philosophy. In this essay, I would like to examine Mersenne's changing attitude toward Galileo. In the early 1620s, Mersenne lists Galileo among the innovators in natural philosophy whose views should be rejected. However, by the early 1630s, less than a decade later, Mersenne has become one of Galileo's most ardent supporters. How, then, did Mersenne learn to love Galileo? (shrink)

This chapter considers the encounter of skepticism with the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical enterprise and focuses on the intriguing feature whereby it is assimilated into this enterprise. In this period, skepticism becomes interchangeable with its other, which helps understand the proliferation of many kinds of views under its name and which forms the background for transforming skepticism into an anonymous, routine practice of raising objections and counter-objections to one’s own view. German philosophers of this era counterpose skepticism to dogmatism and (...) criticism, ancient to modern skepticism, and, importantly, conceptualize the transitions from one form to another, which forms the conceptual matrix in which new disciplinary forms, such as psychology, anthropology, and historicism contend for cultural-intellectual standing beside philosophy. I present this assimilationist trajectory by reviewing three well-known moments of this encounter of skepticism and idealism: (1) Kant’s idealization of skepticism as a floating position amidst various philosophical positions through the dialectic, polemics, systematics, and history of pure reason; (2) Fichte’s schematic conception of skepticism as a dispute of systems in the early Wissenschaftslehre following his review of the skeptic G. E. Schulze’s attacks on Critical philosophy; (3) Hegel’s historicizing conception of skepticism in the context of differences between subjective idealism and speculative thought and his early Jena review of another work by the same skeptic Schulze. (shrink)