Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

INTRODUCTION 11
14 A Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Pyrrho was available in the late
1420S; but it was above all the printing of Latin versions of Sextus Empiricus in
1562 and 1569 which stimulated interest in the ancient sceptics. See CHRP, pp.
679–80, and Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza
(Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1979), p. 19.
Superficially, the sceptical thesis that one must suspend judgement about
everything might seem incompatible with Christian claims to knowledge. In the
sixteenth century, however, Catholics employed sceptical arguments against
Protestants, arguing that sceptical doubts about the worth of reason meant that it
was unsafe to base religion on such a foundation. Religious beliefs must be based
on faith, and more specifically on the faith of a community which had endured
through the centuries—the Catholic Church. See Popkin, op. cit., pp. 55, 58, 70–3,
78–82, 90, 94–5.
15 London, Hutchinson, 1949.
16 E.g. B.P.Copenhaver, ‘Astrology and Magic’, CHRP, pp. 296–300.
17 Bacon and the scholastics: The Advancement of Learning, Book I, ch. 4 (Everyman’s
Library Edition, London, Dent, 1973), p. 26. Bacon and magic: Copenhaver,
op. cit. Bacon and knowledge: A.Pérez-Ramos, Chapter 4 of this volume, pp. 145–
7.
18 Theirs, said Bacon, was a ‘delicate learning’, as opposed to the ‘fantastical learning’
of the scholastics, and they ‘began to hunt more after words than matter’: The
Advancement of Learning, Book 1, ch. 4, p. 24.
19 Bacon knew of Ramus’s work, and gave it his (highly qualified) approval (Bacon,
op. cit., Book II, ch. 17, p. 144). On Ramus’s logic, see for example Lisa Jardine,
‘Humanistic Logic’, CHRP, pp. 184–6, and William and Martha Kneale, The
Development of Logic (Oxford, Clarendon, revised edn, 1984), pp. 301–6.
20 CHRP, pp. 185, 673.
21 W.Kneale, Probability and Induction (Oxford, Clarendon, 1949), p. 48.
22 In this connection, Bacon is praised for having seen the importance of the negative
instance—that is, of eliminative induction as opposed to induction by simple
enumeration. See Bacon, Novum Organum, I, secs 46, 105, and Anthony Quinton,
Francis Bacon (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 56.
23 cf. A.Pérez-Ramos, Chapter 4 of this volume, p. 151.
24 Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy
of Natural Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 246.
25 See, for example, Quinton, op. cit., p. 47.
26 See p. 2 above.
27 For an interesting survey of rationalism as a whole, see J.Cottingham, Rationalism
(London, Paladin, 1984).
28 Leibniz is an exception: cf. N.Jolley, Chapter 11 of this volume, p. 384.
29 J.Cottingham, R.Stoothoff and D.Murdoch (eds), The Philosophical Works of
Descartes (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 3 vols, 1985, 1991:
abbreviated, CSM), ii, p. 12; cf. Discourse on Method, CSM i, pp. 111–19.
30 The term, incidentally, is to be found in Spinoza, who speaks of believers in
miracles as hostile to natural scientists—‘iis, qui scientias naturales colunt’.
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 6; Spinoza, Opera, ed. C.Gebhardt
(Heidelberg, Winter, 4 vols, 1924–6), vol. 3, p. 81.