Journal of the History of Philosophy

As historians of skepticism—whether ancient, modern, or contemporary—we are used to thinking that skepticism is basically about either utterances (as in Pyrrhonist isostheneia, a balance between opposite statements such as ‘honey is sweet’ vs ‘honey is bitter’), or judgments (as in the Pyrrhonist and neo-Academic epochē and the Cartesian suspension of [End Page 603] judgment), or about epistemic values (e.g. “certainty” in Wittgenstein’s Über Gewissheit, and “probability” in Hume’s Enquiries), or about states of mind (such as evidence and belief), or about moral values, customs, laws, and religions (e.g. in Enesidemus’s tenth trope and Montaigne’s Apology).

Compared to this common wisdom, Zerba’s book is a bit wrong-footed. The author begins from the idea that skepticism is mainly about habitus, which, according to the French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, extends to “a more or less synthesized network of cognition and behavioral schemata whose effect is to produce a proportional agent-role fit” (27–28). This extremely broad definition has a great impact on the structure of the book. Doubts about habitus can be found in a wide variety of texts, including literary texts that are supposed to “provide us with construals of reality or rhetorically shaped subject positions that illuminate the conditions and consequences of doubt” (9). Therefore, substantial chapters are devoted to literary figures such as Homer, Sophocles (Philoctetes), Aristophanes (Women of the Thesmophoria), and Shakespeare (Othello and As You Like It).

The second original feature of this book consists in the choice of the ancient authors Zerba has made. The reader probably would expect an extensive treatment of authors such as Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, Enesidemus, Arcesilaus, Carneades, i.e. the most authoritative philosophical representatives of skepticism in its two versions, the Pyrrhonist and the neo-Academic. On the contrary, with the notable exception of Cicero, there is no specific development of these classical authors. What is more, the very founder of ancient skepticism is assumed to be Homer. In the Iliad, the key figure is Achilles who, while representing the heroic posture, at the same time casts doubt on this habitus. In the Odyssey, both Ulysses and Penelope use “polytropic strategies” for handling doubt. Since skepticism is considered not as much an experience of doubt itself as “a manner of handling doubt that develops into a quasi-method” (16), Zerba speaks of a “Pyrrhonist Penelope” (Ulysses is rather defined as “wandering”).

In reality, there is very little Pyrrhonism (in the proper meaning of this word) in her or him, if not for banal but also essential chronological reasons (Pyrrho was a contemporary of Alexander the Great, very far from the age of Homer). Despite some clarifying pages devoted to illustrating technical notions like epochē, isostheneia, modes (tropoi) (90–94), Zerba is in the end obliged to acknowledge that if “the Homeric poems are strikingly skeptical,” that is the case only “in a relaxed sense.” She says also that “evidence in ancient texts supportive of this view is sporadic, unelaborated, and drawn most frequently from the Iliad” (90).

In “Skepticism, Politics, and Rhetoric in the Works of Cicero, Machiavelli, and Montaigne,” she promises “a fundamentally new interpretation of Roman and Renaissance views of republicanism and civic virtue” (6). The achievement is highly debatable since there are already many works on the crisis of civic humanism, and also on the impact skepticism exerted on it.

Among the modern political philosophers, just two major figures are studied: Machiavelli and Montaigne. It is not clear why Machiavelli should be considered skeptical rather than, for example, a republican or a theorist of reason of state. Zerba admits that he had strong (“dogmatic”) assumptions about human nature; and what is credited with skepticism could be better described as a lowering of the stoic doctrine of humanity. By contrast, she explains very well how Machiavelli transformed Cicero’s civic humanism, narrowing the distance between honestum and utile, and stressing the importance of popular drifts against aristocratic...