“In 1958 my intellectual life took a new turn,” wrote Richard Popkin in the first part of his Intellectual Autobiography: Warts and All, a revealing and moving account of his intense life and his impressive and indefatigable academic activity. Because of the psychological pressure that he was under at that time in his work in the Philosophy Department of the University of Iowa, he suffered a severe breakdown, which affected him profoundly. He added: “When this reached a critical point, I suddenly had an overpowering religious experience.”
It is difficult to imagine that he suffered this breakdown, and a previous one in March 1957, just while he was immersed in the task of completing his book The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, which was first published in 1960. Both personal crises resulted in an intensified identification with Judaism, but Popkin seems to have remembered only the one in the fall of 1958 when he wrote his autobiographical essay.2 In the difficult period when he was finishing his monumental study on the history of skepticism Popkin began to reflect increasingly on the Jewish origins of several of the first important skeptics of the early modern period: “I began to explore and consider […] why four early sceptics, Montaigne his cousin Francisco Sanchez, the Jesuit priest Juan Maldonado, and Pedro Valencia, all of Spanish background, and all descended from Jewish forced converts to Christianity, were the ones who made scepticism a living issue in the late sixteenth century.”
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kaplan, Y. (2008). Richard Popkin' Marrano Problem. In: Popkin, J.D. (eds) The Legacies of Richard Popkin. International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 198. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8474-4_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8474-4_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-8473-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-8474-4
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)