Review of How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life. By Massimo Pigliucci. Tarcher. 333 pp. $32.

“We should not be too confident in our belief in anything,” Marcus Tullius Cicero, a statesman and philosopher in the Roman Republic, often declared. Nonetheless, Massimo Pigliucci points out that Cicero maintained we should embrace beliefs not as absolute truths, but as logically consistent propositions that conform to the best available evidence and are subject to revision in light of new information.

In How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic, Pigliucci (a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and author, among other books, of How to Be a Stoic) uses Cicero as his guide in an examination of the role curiosity and reason can play in laying the foundations of a good life. Part biography of an iconic figure in Western civilization, part history of the last days of the Roman Republic, and part self-help primer, his book is informative and engaging.

Pigliucci acknowledges that “even the best philosophical arguments sometimes fail to convince people,” especially when they concern........

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