Preliminary Material -- Chapter One: Introduction -- Chapter Two: The Life of Isaac La Peyrère -- Chapter Three: The History of the Pre-Adamite Theory from Ancient Times to La Peyrère -- Chapter Four: Biblical Criticism and Interpretation in La Peyrère -- Chapter Five: French Nationalist Messianism up to La Peyrère -- Chapter Six: La Peyrère's Heretical Theological Theories -- Chapter Seven: The Influence of La Peyrère's Biblical Criticism -- Chapter Eight: The Influence of La Peyrère's French Oriented Messianism -- Chapter Nine: The Pre-Adamite Theory in the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Conflicts of Polygenetic and Monogenetic Theories -- Chapter Ten: Pre-Adamism and Racism -- Chapter Eleven: La Peyrère's Legacy in the Twentieth Century -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Since the publication of the first edition of Richard Popkin’s classic The History of Scepticism in 1960, skepticism has been increasingly recognized as a major force in the development of early modern philosophy. This book provides a review of current scholarship and significant updated research on some of the main thinkers and issues related to the reappraisal of ancient skepticism in the modern age. Special attention is given to the nature, importance, and relation to religion of Montaigne’s and Hume’s skepticisms; to the various skeptical and non-skeptical sources of Cartesian doubt; to the skeptical and anti-skeptical impact of Cartesianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and to philosophers who dealt with skeptical issues in the development of their own various intellectual interests.

This volume is the first to adopt systematically a comparative approach to the role of ancient texts and traditions in early modern scholarship, science, medicine, and theology. It offers a new method for understanding early modern knowledge.

This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres – from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing – was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.

Modern historical biblical criticism, while having many strengths, often operates under the pretensions of objectivity, as if such scholarship were neutral and disinterested. Examining the history and roots of modern biblical scholarship shows that such objectivity is elusive, and was never intended by the method's earliest practitioners. Building upon his earlier work in Three Skeptics and the Bible and Theology, Politics, and Exegesis, Morrow continues this historical investigation into the political and philosophical roots of modern biblical criticism in Pretensions of Objectivity, in the hope of developing a criticism of biblical criticism and of making space for theological exegesis.