63 S. Charles and P.J. Smith (eds.), Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung, International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 210, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4810-1_5, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 To appreciate more fully the philosophical and historical significance of scepticism in the first half of the eighteenth century, one must consider not only the sceptical arguments themselves but also investigate the reception of these ideas by the oppo- nents of philosophical scepticism. The posthumous publication of Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’entendement humain in 1723, the French translation of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism in 1725, and the continuing influence of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique invigo- rated anti-sceptical thinkers in the Francophone world and beyond, provoking them to offer rebuttals to epistemological scepticism. Catholic and Protestant thinkers alike attempted to strengthen or to construct anew the epistemological foundations of human knowledge. Their reactions shed crucial light on the manner in which the opponents of scepticism perceived Pyrrhonism as a historical and a philosophical phenomenon. The systems proposed by these critics, in turn, reveal the specific ways by which the intellectual world of the early Enlightenment attempted to solid- ify criteria of certainty in the midst of that confrontation. By considering these critiques, we can both expand our understanding of the influence of philosophical scepticism in this period and help to sketch a lived dialogical portrait of intellectual change in the eighteenth century. The decade of the 1730s presents an especially vibrant period of Protestant anti-sceptical critiques. In 1733, the Swiss theologian and professor of philosophy and mathematics Jean-Pierre de Crousaz published a lengthy and polemical Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et moderne, where he attempted to offer extensive refutations A. Matytsin (*) Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: matytsin@sas.upenn.ed The Protestant Critics of Bayle at the Dawn of the Enlightenment Anton Matytsin