When Hell is Other People. Interiority and Skepticism in António Lopes da Veiga

Abstract

The study of the process of construction of modern subjectivity offers an image of constant tensions between universality and particularity, which could be considered a manifestation of the conflictual nature of Modernity itself. As a way to solve the problems derived of the separation between universal and particular dimensions of this process -that has resulted in opposing interpretations regarding its confesional nature- a close study of the particular experience of the seventeenth-century thinker Antonio Lopes da Veiga is presented here. This study is intended to provide some insight of the way in which similar intelectual concerns -of an international scale- over interiority and exteriority in epistemology, political thought, philology, theology and history, resulted in the constitution of a particular perspective regarding the individual.