From Ancient Greece to the New World

Skepticism, European Crisis, and the Invention of the Americas

Abstract

This article investigates the role of philosophical skepticism in the formation of European modernity, linking its roots in Ancient Greece to the historical processes that shaped Europe between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. By examining the structural medieval crises—wars, plagues, famine, feudal decline, religious reforms, and political instability—it shows how doubt reemerged both as a philosophical attitude and as a response to the social, cultural, and epistemic tensions of the period. It then explores the relationship between skepticism and the great navigations, highlighting how the metaphor of “Columbus’s egg” synthesizes both the rupture with medieval paradigms and the logic of appropriation that characterized European expansion. The encounter with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas produced an epistemological crisis that unsettled the European imaginary and contributed to the reconfiguration of modern skepticism. In this context, the works of Montaigne (2018), Danilo Marcondes (2019), and Popkin (2000) serve as our point of departure and are analyzed as privileged expressions of this critique, revealing the relativity of customs and the violence embedded in colonial narratives. The article concludes that skepticism, far from being merely an abstract philosophical current, is a fundamental element for understanding the tensions between modernity, coloniality, and the invention of the Americas.