Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the history of philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at historyoflowsvy.net.

Today's episode don't be so short French skepticism.

As we've been seeing the reformation led to results that were unexpected at the time and ironic to boot.

Luther was neither a tolerant nor a secular man, but in the long run what he started led to the emergence of more secular and religiously tolerant societies.

In the shorter one the reformation led to a reawakening of philosophical skepticism, which may seem if anything even more astounding.

16th century intellectuals seemed to have been mighty sure of themselves.

Luther was convinced that the Pope was the anti-Christ while Catholics felt equally certain of the authority of the Church.

It was indeed an age when people were quite literally ready to kill anyone who disagreed with them about their most deeply held convictions.

Here we may recall Montaigne's remark, it is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them.

In a well-known book on the history of early modern skepticism, Richard Popkin tried to understand the skeptical leanings of Montaigne and other figures who wrote in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

For Popkin, one major factor was the impact of the greatest ancient skeptic, Sextus, and Piracus.

His writings had been known to some extent even in the medieval era, but in the 1560s Latin translations of his writings appeared.

Since humanists also knew about the earlier academic form of skepticism through Cicero, this Hellenistic tradition of thought could now take its place alongside Stoicism as a powerful influence.

But Popkin also pointed to the reformation as an important part of the story.

His idea was that the conflict between Protestants and Catholics brought attention to what he calls the problem of the criterion.

This is a problem about how to resolve disagreement.

If you claim to be taller than me, and I deny this, though, to be honest it's not unlikely, then there is a criterion we can use to settle the matter, a literal yardstick.

But there was no yardstick available when it came to the religious disputes that erupted in the wake of Luther.

Catholics pointed to the authoritative standing of church tradition and the papacy, whereas Lutherans rejected this out of hand.

With no shared standard by which the argument could be settled, the rival parties instead deployed abusive rhetoric and violent force.

Popkin was right to point out that this problem was anticipated in the works of sexists and other ancient skeptics.

A standard technique of this school was to point to disagreements on philosophical issues, and then to suggest that there was no way to decide these issues without assuming some further equally controversial premises.

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