Machado de Assis: the brazilian pyrrhonian

Resumo

Machado de Assis is clearly a novelist of a somewhat philosophical bent. That the philosophy expressed in his novels is in some loose sense sceptical has been remarked before', and is also clear enough; its most obvious aspects are perhaps a deep-rooted suspicion of dogmatic and optimistic social theories, and a powerful sense of the inscrutability of human motives and reasons for acting. Since Machado is known to have been an avid reader of Montaigne, this scepticism is not especially surprising. What is much more surprising is the main thesis of Maia Neto's book: that the scepticism exhibited in Machado's novels is specifically of the ancient Pyrrhonian variety, represented in the surviving literature by Sextus Empiricus.