H-France Review Volume 20 (2020) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 20 (January 2020), No. 14 Ioana Manea, Politics and Scepticism in La Mothe Le Vayer: The Two-Faced Philosopher? Tubingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2019. 203 pp. Text and bibliography. 58€ (pb). ISBN 9783823382836. Anton M. Matytsin, University of Florida. Ioana Manea’s Politics and Scepticism in La Mothe Le Vayer seeks to untangle the ambiguities and apparent contradictions inherent in the writings of seventeenth-century humanist polymath François de La Mothe Le Vayer. Although he served as a tutor for the young Louis XIV, La Mothe Le Vayer also acquired a reputation for being a libertine and embracing the subversive philosophy of Pyrrhonian skepticism. His extensive writings included both manuals for the instruction of the dauphin and skeptical dialogues about various subjects. While he openly embraced fideism, a view that privileged the reliance on faith over reason, his writings also seemed to challenge established intellectual and political authorities. Manea offers an original reading of these texts, paying attention both to his controversial writings and works “he wrote for the powerful” (p. 13). La Mothe Le Vayer was a controversial thinker among his contemporaries, and he remains the subject of debates among modern scholars. As the preeminent historian of skepticism Richard Popkin has pointed out, La Mothe Le Vayer has been alternatively described as “the Christian sceptic” and as the “epicurean unbeliever.’”[1] Disagreements about the sincerity of his fideism divide scholars into those who read him as a Christian Pyrrhonist and those who see his fideism as dissimulated and his ideas as advocating irreligion and challenging established authorities.[2] Manea thus seeks to resolve this dichotomy and to explain how La Mothe Le Vayer “wrote in order to support or, apparently, to undermine the powerful” (p. 13). Manea’s book begins by examining La Mothe Le Vayer’s writings on human knowledge and skepticism. She explains how his embrace of skepticism did not preclude him from pursuing philosophical investigations. Criticizing dogmatic thinkers for trying “to impose on the universe a regularity that is foreign to it” (p. 34), La Mothe Le Vayer noted that “the fierce disagreements” among the different philosophical systems discredited each of them (p. 34-35). It was this “juxtaposition of contradictions” that ultimately justified “the suspension of judgment or the épokhé” (p. 40). La Mothe Le Vayer was particularly critical of philosophers who sought to go beyond the apparent or visible nature of things and speculated about hidden causes. Nevertheless, in his view, the suspension of judgment did not preclude the possibility of “appreciating the different theories that are meant to explain the phenomena of the world” in a dispassionate and disinterested manner (p. 52).