Ceticismo moral e paradoxo: Guy de Brués contra os “Novos Acadêmicos”

The purpose of this paper is to examine skepticism about morals and laws as addressed and responded to by Guy de Brués in his Dialogues against the New Academicians (1557). I propose that for a proper appreciation of this theme, it is necessary to distinguish two levels at which this philosophy presents itself in the work: the one in which it is expounded in the speech of the characters charged with defending it (upholding different versions of the thesis that "everything is opinion") and the one that is discernible through some points of agreement throughout the discussions, in which an affinity among the interlocutors with the New Academy is rather revealed. This apparently paradoxical situation can be partly understood if we collate the Dialogues with the declamatio or the Ciceronian philosophical dialogue. More generally, we suggest that the role of the philosophy of the New Academy, especially in its moral and political dimension, is greater than usually recognized in the rediscovery of skepticism in sixteenth-century France.