The arrival of Europeans in the New World in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, often neglected by historians of philosophy, is a crucial historical event that transformed modern thought. Skepticism and the New World: The Anthropological Argument and the Emergence of Modernity argues that the encounter between Europeans and the inhabitants of the New World challenges Europeans’ concept of a universal human nature and leads to new forms of skepticism.

Contrasting a theological and political debate on the rights of indigenous peoples with the rights of conquest and “just war” of the Spanish, Danilo Marcondes examines their anthropology, exploring how the French saw the indigenous cultures of the New World and how they shaped their epistemology.