Scepticism was a most important philosophical view at the beginning of the eighteenth century, continuing the development that had started in the Renaissance with the ideas of Montaigne and was then presented by Charron, La Mothe Le Vayer, Gassendi, and Foucher, among others, during the seventeenth century. The major philosophers from Descartes to Locke and Leibniz had struggled to provide answers to the sceptical challenges.

Three major philosophical sceptical works appeared in the first decades of the eighteenth century. There was a new and very erudite Latin and Greek edition of the writings of Sextus Empiricus done by the learned J. A. Fabricius, as well as the first published French translation of Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Second, the revised and much enlarged second edition of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique appeared in 1702, including the author’s defence of what he had said about Pyrrhonism and atheism in the first edition. Third was the posthumous publication of Bishop Huet’s very sceptical Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humaine (1723), which was quickly put out in Latin, English, German, and later Italian. These provided important bases for discussions of scepticism throughout the eighteenth century.