While at the HAB I am primarily working on my project on ‘Pierre Bayle and the Uncertainty of Historical Knowledge in Early Enlightenment Europe’. Bayle has long fascinated me; his love of paradoxes and his insistence on uncertainty still generates intense arguments between historians and philosophers over how to interpret him. I am looking closely at the treatment of historical topics in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), asking how he probes the nature and limits of historical knowledge. My wider interest is in the history of historiography, and its philosophical and cultural problematics. Related to this, I am also spending some of my time here finalizing the manuscript of my current book project, which is on the history of the idea of historical empathy,  from 1700 to the present.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/adam-sutcliffe