Skepticism and Politics in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Friday May  11th & Saturday May 12th A conference at the  William Andrews Clark Memorial Library   —organized by Gianni Paganini, University of Piedmont, Vercelli and John Christian Laursen, University of California, Riverside This conference starts from the point that much of our thinking in both philosophy and politics today is an inheritance from the encounters by major philosophers such as Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Smith, and Kant with the skeptical traditions. Their work, in turn, influenced a host of minor figures such as the libertines of the seventeenth century and the political activists of the time of the French Revolution. The skeptical foundations of Hobbesian political philosophy, Cartesianism, and the clandestine writers of the seventeenth century fed into the Humean empiricism, Smithian cosmopolitanism, and Kantian political idealism of the Enlightenment. Along the way, literature and