As we know, Popkin pointed out that this phenomenon had two causes, the first being the re-edited texts of Sextus Empiricus and the appearance of the first Latin translations, the second the growth of Protestantism and the Protestant rejection of the rule of faith. It was Richard Popkin who explained how scepticism has come to exert so powerful an influence upon modern philosophy2. As an example of this he used to say that there had been three fairy godmothers at the birth of modern philosophy, about whom we knew very little - modern stoicism, epicureanism and scepticism.1 These lines were written in 1942 and since then we have learnt a great deal about them, but most especially about modern scepticism. The Spanish philosopher Ortega said, speaking of “the less brilliant periods” in the history of philosophy, that the great thinkers had been the subject of a study so exclusive as to prejudice that of other periods, of lesser brilliance but decisive historical importance. Some contemporary thinkers have gone as far as comparing his notion of language and metaphysics to that of someone like Wittgenstein. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Sanches, as he has come to be seen as a significant philosopher in the history of scepticism, along with Montaigne, Descartes, and Hume. Sanches was not only a philosopher he was also a physician, and a professor of medicine – a fact that doubtlessly tempered his scepticism. In fact, in the last twenty-five to thirty years, his work has at last been acknowledged as having served as a background source of Descartes’ refutation of scepticism. His skeptical ideas concerning what could be known of the phenomenal world, influenced the work of other philosophers like René Descartes. Sanches gained notoriety through his controversial text, That Nothing is Known. Francisco Sanches (1551–1623) was an important figure in the history of philosophical scepticism, and most specifically in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
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