Hi, I'm Peter Adams, 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 historyofilocity.net. Today's episode will be an interview about skepticism in the 16th century with Henrik Lagerlund, who is professor of History of Philosophy at Stockholm University. Hello Henrik.

Hi, I'm really happy to have you on the podcast because your experience has really done a lot to draw attention to the interest of philosophy in the 16th century, which is not something everyone has tried to do.

No, it is an important period in the history of philosophy, much more important than I think many, many realized.

Well, hopefully people have already been convinced of that by the series so far, but if not, maybe they'll be convinced by the next half an hour or so.

We're going to talk about skepticism. Let's start with a conceptual overview rather than diving right into the history.

What do you understand by the term skepticism and what distinctions should we make between different kinds of skepticism that might help us be ready for the discussion to follow?

Traditionally, almost the only thing that people have meant with skepticism in this period is the ancient skepticism.

So it's sexist who was translated at this time and also the academic skepticism that's foremost at this time was available through Cicero's academic.

So those are the two that people have usually meant when they talk about skepticism in this time.

I think that that's limited, unfortunately, that there is a back history to skepticism, which when you see, when you get today,

you see that he's aware of a much wider kind of skepticism than just these ancient.

So the problem of writing the history of skepticism before has been that you limited yourself.

Skepticism is either parallelism or its academic skepticism.

But there is a medieval tradition which has to be taken into account where you have this very strong skepticism,

kind of global skepticism, where what we today would call the external world skepticism.

But we traditionally think they are introduced, but which is strongly available in the 14th century onwards.

There are other more local discussions of skepticism in the scholastic tradition of can we know substances,

can we know through representations and so forth.

And these are available and discussed throughout the medieval tradition.

You can come through nominalism as a kind of skepticism where your skeptic towards sort of entities like universals, the existence of these ones.

And you can see the ideas you can see, I think in contemporary discussions, you often see religious skepticism,

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