Scetticismo e matematica nella Vérité des sciences di Mersenne

The epistemological proposal presented by Marin Mersenne in La vérité des sciences (1625) to disprove the new Pyrrhonists' views was interpreted by Richard H. Popkin as a constructive and mitigated form of scepticism, which already embodied the basic features of "positivism" and "pragmatism" ante litteram that Robert Lenoble attributed to the mechanism of Mersenne. Departing from Popkin's interpretation, Peter Dear argued instead that Mersenne's "mitigated scepticism" originated not from the Pyrrhonian crisis, but from scholastic logic and dialectical probabilism. In this essay the author proposes to consider the epistemological reflection of La vérité des sciences as resolutely anti-sceptical and to underline its connections with the debate concerning certainty and scientific status of mathematics in the Galilean age. Sharing some of the most radical theses of Giuseppe Biancani - a distinguished Jesuit mathematician - Mersenne bases the certainty of mathematics on the Aristotelian doctrine of demonstratio and of Scientia by replacing Aristotelian physics with an entirely intelligible mathematical physics, subtracted from the inaccuracies of sensible matter as well as from the unknowability of natural essences. It is a science that cannot be doubted founded on the certainty of mathematics, beyond any concession to probabilism or weakened forms of skepticism.