Francisco Sanches

Francisco Sanches (about 1550 to 1623) was a Hispano-Portuguese philosopher and physician of Sephardi Jewish origin, raised in Braga and educated at Bordeaux, Rome, Montpellier and Toulouse, where he later held a chair of philosophy and medicine. His Quod nihil scitur (That Nothing Is Known), written in 1576 and published in 1581, uses classical skeptical arguments to show that science in the Aristotelian sense of necessary causes cannot be reached, because the search for causes falls into infinite regress and the syllogism is circular. Perfect knowledge would be an intuitive grasp of each individual thing, which the limits of the senses and the endless variety of objects put out of reach. Yet he drew a constructive conclusion: we should still seek limited knowledge through observation, experience and judgment, an early form of mitigated skepticism.