Bayle, Pierre

« Bayle, Pierre Bayle was one of the most profound sceptical thinkers of all time.

He was also a champion of religious toleration, and an important moral philosopher.

The fundamental aim of his scepticism was to curb the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith.

Human reason, he believed, suffers from two fundamental weaknesses: it has a limited capacity to motivate our actions, and it is more a negative than a positive faculty, better at uncovering the defects of various philosophical positions than at justifying any one of them.

This conception of reason led Bayle to see, with an uncommon clarity, that the nature of the sceptic's arguments must be to proceed by internal demolition, showing how claims to knowledge undermine themselves in their own terms. Bayle's moral thought is to be found essentially in his critique of attempts (such as that of Malebranche) to show how God, all-powerful and good, could have created a world in which there is evil.

Such theodicies, he argued, rely on unacceptable models of moral rationality.

Bayle's arguments reveal a view of moral reasoning that is of considerable interest in its own right.

Like Malebranche (and contrary to Leibniz, who attacked Bayle's critique of theodicy), he believed that there are duties superior to that of bringing about the most good overall.

But unlike Malebranche, Bayle saw these duties as lying not in what the rational agent owes himself but in what he owes to the inviolable individuality of others.

This outlook had its psychological roots, no doubt, in Bayle's own experience as a Huguenot victim of religious persecution. 1 Scepticism Pierre Bayle was one of the most important sceptical thinkers of all time, as well as a notable moral philosopher and advocate of religious toleration.

The fundamental motivation of his scepticism was religious: his aim was to curb the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith.

Born into a Calvinist family in Carla in southern France, he became a professor of philosophy in the Protestant academy at Sedan.

After its abolition (1681) and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which ended Protestant toleration in France, Bayle fled to Holland and spent the rest of his life in Rotterdam.

His Calvinist conviction that God is rationally inscrutable spurred his wide-ranging attack on the power of reason to shape our conduct and to make sense of the world.

As he wrote in the article on ‘Paulicians' in his most important work, the Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary) (1696: Paulicians, note E ), ‘The ways of God are not our ways… [We must accept] the elevation of faith and the abasement of reason' . Bayle believed that human reason suffers from two fundamental weaknesses.

The first is that reason is quite limited in its capacity to motivate our actions.

Human beings act more often in virtue of their dominant passions than on the basis of their professed principles.

In his first important work, Pensées diverses sur la comète (Miscellaneous reflections on the comet) (1682), Bayle made use of this observation to argue that, contrary to the accepted opinion of his time, atheists would be able to live together peacefully in society.

Were they to follow. »