The Renaissance, Enlightenment & Empiricism
The Scientific Method of Skepticism
This is a part of my brief series tracing the historical lineage of skepticism and certainty in history. I start with the Hellenic thinkers, then I move to Christendom’s influence, and in this post, I briefly look at the influence of the Enlightenment.
Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. — Voltaire
During the Renaissance, many saw the need for a “method” with which to demarcate between reasonable and unreasonable teaching. This was the point in history where rationalism and empiricism really wanted to take a warranted seat at the table of ideology where superstition and callousness held most of the attention.
Figures like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, the founders of modern philosophy, “rejected the assumptions” of their day and instead introduced some of the first modern notions of empiricism.
In fact, Bacon claimed that “blind immoderate religious zeal” was a “troublesome and intractable enemy”; and Descartes introduced his ‘method of doubt’ that questioned everything he accepted without evidence.
Descartes wanted to discover whether he could know anything for certain. And what he infamously discovered is that…
