debates reinforces the mood that there can be no agreement on knowledge. In
the later centuries of medieval Christendom, the endless and unconvincing
debates of Thomists and Scotists feed an increasingly critical mood among the
nominalists. The mood intensifies by the late 1500s, with the piling of position
on position as Renaissance Humanists revive ancient philosophies; the result
is another period in which the law of small numbers does not structure
attention and the energy of intellectual life flows in no clear channels. External
political conditions compound the situation; the splits and subsplits among
Lutheran, Calvinist, and sectarian Protestantism, and the machinations of
secular lords between these and Counterreformation Catholicism, add up to a
vast intellectual weariness of debate, which provides the setting in which
Montaigne, Sanchez, and Charron appear. In our own times, the massive
expansion of the university professoriate resulting from the inflationary edu-
cational marketplace from the 1960s onward has brought about the reappear-
ance of skepticism in the relativistic anti-foundationalism of cultural histori-
cists and postmodernists.
These are the skepticisms of overcrowding the attention space. Other
conditions give rise to less encompassing uses of skeptical tools. One is a fideist
use of skeptical arguments, not as omni-skepticism but to counterattack the
critics of religious tradition. Here we find Catholics using skeptical arguments
to undermine Protestant reformers’ reliance on the Bible; Christian conserva-
tives undercutting scientific materialism or sensory empiricism; or again Jacobi
defending scriptural faith against Kantian Idealism. Once the skeptical argu-
ment is prominently advanced in the attention space, it can be used in later
generations for various, more limited purposes, in combination with the main
doctrines of other factions in the field. The most striking of such uses of
skepticism is the cogito.
recurrence of the cogito
The “cogito ergo sum” is a dialectical move, building on omni-skepticism to
establish a criterion of knowledge and hence a critical epistemology; by apply-
ing skepticism to itself, one establishes what cannot be doubted. The cogito
is a classic example of an upward step in the reflexivity hierarchy. Some of
the greatest figures in the histories of their respective traditions—Augustine,
Shankara, Ibn Sina, Descartes, Fichte—made use of the cogito; that is to say,
great reputations were made thereby as the result of opening up a new expanse
of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence.^12
Augustine wrote in the late 300s c.e., in the generation of the Christian
“Fathers of the Church,” when its doctrines were definitively codified. As a
professional teacher of rhetoric, a convert from the last pagan profession,
Augustine was in a position to ground Christian doctrine in the accumulated
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^813