Sobre o ceticismo acadêmico de Huet, Foucher e Hume

Richard Popkin in his “The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza”, chapter VII, presents the tendency of modern philosophers to reject the pyrrhonic scepticism, since it is dangerous to science, and the extreme dogmatism, due to its dubiousness. According to Popkin, the solution for these philosophers was to recommend a mitigated or constructive scepticism, which became respectable only with David Hume. Popkin conceives this kind of scepticism “[...] a theory that could accept the full force of the sceptical attack on the possibility of human knowledge, in the sense of necessary truths about the nature of reality, and yet allow for the possibility of knowledge in a lesser sense, as convincing or probable thuths about appearences” (Popkin, 14, p. 211). This paper shows that besides Hume the philosophers Pierre-Daniel Huet and Simon Foucher can be counted among the members of this philosophic school, that we call academic scepticism.