Kirjahaku

The arrival of Europeans in the New World in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, often neglected by historians of philosophy, is a crucial historical event that transformed modern thought. Skepticism and the New World: The Anthropological Argument and the Emergence of Modernity argues that the encounter between Europeans and the inhabitants of the New World challenges Europeans’ concept of a universal human nature and leads to new forms of skepticism. Contrasting a theological and political debate on the rights of indigenous peoples with the rights of conquest and “just war” of the Spanish, Danilo Marcondes examines their anthropology, exploring how the French saw the indigenous cultures of the New World and how they shaped their epistemology.

Danilo Marcondes argues that, contrary to a traditional view maintaining that language is not given any central role in early modern philosophy, there was what could be considered an “early linguistic turn” in the seventeenth century, opening a place for the philosophy of language as part of the philosophical system under construction at that period. Skepticism and Language in Early Modern Philosophy: The Early Linguistic Turn also claims that the revival of ancient skepticism at the modern age contributed decisively towards this “linguistic turn” in so far as it attacked the “powers of the intellect” in representing reality and making knowledge possible. Marcondes argues that the concept of language itself becomes crucial to this investigation since during this period it was understood in different ways by different thinkers leading to the central role which will be given to the philosophy of language in contemporary philosophy.