Antony McKenna has argued that Pascal has been misunderstood as a "Christian Pyrrhonist" when he is in fact an Academic sceptic. He holds Pascal's scepticism to be a negative dogmatism and Christian Pyrrhonism to be a contradiction in terms and thus useless as a category of intellectual history. This essay argues that McKenna's reading of Pascal is unsustainable and that his assault on the notion of Christian Pyrrhonism is based on a mistaken conception of what constitutes "true" Pyrrhonism. In fact, it argues that McKenna's Pyrrhonism is actually a form of Academicism and that Pascal himself understood the difference between these ancient schools more accurately.
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