Paige McLoughlin’s Reviews > Doubt: A History > Status Update

Going through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Doubt at is ascendence. I am not sure things look so good for it now than it did at the time of writing.

Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, and the growing enlightenment and growing doubt. Now we are getting into really modern times and the time of Europe and eventually America at on track to its apogee of power.

The early modern period of the printing press and the protestant reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and here too there were doubters from the Friends of Rabelais to Michel de Montaigne and Jesuits visiting the highly impressive culture of China.

Of course this knowledge helped enrich those cultures that took it in and added their own helpful additions and completions.

When empires collapse, old knowledge can become an idol for zealots to smash. Some things compatible with the new Christian order during the fall of Rome were preserved, but other things were saved by non-believers and heretics if it was deemed precious if at the time unorthodox. This knowledge looped around the Mediterranean, looking for a home for a thousand years.

Early Christianity in the Roman Empire, the people who voiced against it are harder to find as it won. However, some within the faith and without it still grappled with doubt, including Boethius and Hypatia, both of whom paid the price of being out of step with the authorities' plans or ideology.

Gods of the Roman empire were more state gods with elements of bureaucracy & local cults of the emperor after the Republic, plus gods to sacrifice and beseech for protection or good things like money, health, or love. In this environment were the Skeptics and Epicureans as a kind of philosopher's counter-culture, making the daddy of counter cultures that sprang up nearly 2000 years ago.

An excursion to the indian and East Asian traditions of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and the challengers of Carvaka and the figures like Wang Chung. Doubting Karma or cosmic justice is like doubting God's Goodness for theists in Abrahamic traditions, which was the doubt so taboo in these cultures.

The first place to look is the classical Greeks and the Hellenistic world. So that tension between the gods that support the polis and individuals and the chaotic Mediterranean world that was also quite open to outside influence, which got pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their descendants of skeptics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics to address this tension.

Read the preface largely as a question of how we deal with the clash of human values generated on the inside and the cold, unfeeling, chaotic world that seems indifferent to that on the outside.