Jean-Luc Solere

Pierre Bayle shows that, in order to avoid devastating objections, materialism should postulate that the property of thinking does not emerge from certain material combinations but is present in matter from the start and everywhere—a hypothesis recently revived and labelled “panpsychism”. There are reasons for entertaining the idea that Bayle actually considers this enhanced materialism to be tenable, as it might use the same line of defence that Bayle outlined for Stratonism. However, this would lead to a view similar to Locke’s superaddition theory, and I contend that such cannot be Bayle’s position because he embraces the Cartesian principle that each substance has only one principal attribute. This makes untenable, in his eyes, any system that conjoins thought with matter in the same simple substance. By contrast, this makes clear which kinds of metaphysics and epistemology panpsychists need to adopt to defend their view.

pierre bayle’s treatise on tolerance is a landmark in the birth of the modern mind. Written shortly before Locke’s Letter on Toleration, it advocates full toleration of all religious beliefs, not by reduction to the lowest common denominator, but rather because of the moral evilness of persecutions and forced conversions.However, many commentators believe that there is a flaw in Bayle’s theory: the so-called “conscientious persecutor aporia.”1 In order to show the wickedness of persecution, Bayle holds up conscience as an apparently absolute, inviolable principle. As we shall see, the primary ethical imperative is to obey the “dictates” of one’s conscience, that is, to do what conscience shows us to..

La solution de Thomas d’Aquin au problème de l’intensification des qualités souffre d’une certaine instabilité et, dans la génération suivante, a été disloquée par les différentes contraintes qu’elle tentait de concilier. Cet article explore les réponses apportées par Gilles de Rome, Godefroid de Fontaines, Pierre d’Auvergne et Thomas de Sutton. Introduite par Godefroid, mais développée par Sutton, la notion de mode va jouer un rôle très important. La solution de Sutton, particulièrement, invite à une comparaison avec la théorie des modes intrinsèques chez Duns Scot.

The problem of the intensification and remission of qualities was a crux for philosophical, theological, and scientific thought in the Middle Ages. It was raised in Antiquity with this remark of Aristotle: some qualities, as accidental beings, admit the more and the less. Admitting more and less is not a trivial property, since it belongs neither to every category of being, nor to every quality. Rather it applies only to states and dispositions such as virtue, to affections of bodies such as heat and sweetness, and to affections of soul such as anger. However, the property of admitting more and less was a matter of importance for the qualitative physics that had reigned up to about the time of Descartes, a physics which was concerned with concepts such as heat, coldness, lightness, heaviness, and so on.