Anna De Pace's Noetica e scetticismo is a study that should not pass unnoticed among students of the history of philosophy, particularly among those interested in skepticism and Renaissance philosophy. In approaching the birth of modern thought and science, the debates around the diffusion of skepticism during the early modern period are of particular importance. According to a historiographical trend that is still widely accepted, only when the works of Sextus Empiricus were published in France did skepticism become a complete and vital philosophical phenomenon. In Richard Popkin's opinion — to which De Pace refers — Montaigne's pyrrhonism represented a very strong blow for the intellectual world of the time, though it could also be considered the cradle of modern thought as it forced philosophers to take sides regarding its validity. The case for Italy, however, would be different: the Italian cultural context remained largely untouched by skeptical ideas. Already towards the middle of the sixteenth century, after Girolamo Savonarola and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (on whom the recent study by Gian Mario Cao, Scepticism and Orthodoxy: Gianfrancesco as a Reader of Sextus Empiricus [2007], can be read with profit), any interest in skepticism would be very low. Still earlier, even though the humanistic rediscovery of the sources of ancient skepticism was mainly an Italian affair, its weight could have not been compared to that of other philosophical orientations. The main hermeneutical idea posited that the most important philosophical currents in Italy during the sixteenth century were Aristotelianism and Platonism, and that they did not leave room for any skeptical influence. Most scholars would resist the idea that Paduan Aristotelianism could be connected to skeptical motives, while, as far as Renaissance Platonism is concerned, a prevalent tendency in historic-philosophical studies would associate it with the syncretistic orientation of the Platonic Academy of Florence, which emphasized a dogmatic element.

In her important book, La scepsi, il sapere e l'anima: Dissonanze nella cerchia laurenziana (2002), which should be read together with Noetica e scetticismo, De Pace has already shown how the Florentine Platonic culture of the late fifteenth century could not be reduced to mere Ficinian hegemony. What should be taken into deeper consideration, she attests, is the point of view of Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose anthropological conception of the modesty of the natural human condition would distance itself clearly from Marsilio Ficino's idea of man. In her new study, De Pace focuses on Jacopo Mazzoni of Cesena and Giulio Castellani of Faenza, two thinkers who, a century later, took the intellectual heritage of Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico very seriously. Mazzoni approached Pico's and Poliziano's thought with the purpose of bestowing on skepticism a degree of philosophical dignity. Although in his De comparatione Platonis et Aristotelis (1597) Mazzoni attests his desire to disprove the skeptical belief in the difficulties of comprehending the truth, his interpretations and his solutions seem to be designed to contrast the communis opinio on skepticism. As a matter of fact, Mazzoni is convinced that the philosophical problems proposed by the skeptical tradition were entirely valid and, therefore, were to be taken into philosophical consideration: of particular importance was the idea of harmonizing skeptical theories with principles that could be employed to protect the theoretical capabilities of man. In order to prove his philosophical position, he adopts the doxographic approach already familiar to Poliziano and Giovanni Pico.

A few decades earlier, Giulio Castellani put forward an evaluation of skepticism that drew very different (if not entirely opposite) conclusions from those of Mazzoni. In his Adversus M. Tullii Ciceronis Academicas Quaestiones (1558), Castellani even suggested that skeptics should not be considered philosophers at all. According to Castellani, Cicero wastes his time trying to reconcile the thought of ancient thinkers with his philosophical belief: not only Plato and Aristotle, but all wise men of Greece and Italy must be considered dogmaticians.

By comparing the positions of the two philosophers and analyzing in-depth the repercussions of their disagreement, Anna De Pace makes a very valuable addition to philosophical scholarship. Her book should find a steady place in the libraries of scholars interested not only in the history of skepticism and of Renaissance philosophy, but also in the diffusion of philosophical ideas in Europe.