Abstract

Pierre-Daniel Huet is one of the most important skeptics from the end of the 17th/begining of the 18th centuries. In this article, I show that Descartes is the main source of Huet’s skepticism by means of six remarks, each developed in a section of the article. 1) Huet discovered Cartesian doubt before he discovered ancient skeptical doubt ; 2) the skepticism exhibited in the Traité Philosophique de la Faiblesse de l’Esprit Humain and the anti-cartesianism exhibited in the Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae were originally parts of the same work ; 3) there is a skeptical Descartes in the Censura ; 4) the intellectual biography of the Provençal in the Traité Philosophique updates and pyrrhonizes Descartes’s intellectual biography in the Discours de la Méthode ; 5) four skeptical arguments in the Traité — including the most important one in the book — are Cartesian ; 6) Huet’s skepticism was perceived as partially Cartesian by the first readers of the manuscript.