•  83
    Bayle on the (Ir)rationality of Religious Belief
    Philosophy Compass 8 (6): 560-569. 2013.
    Bayle's conception of reason is notoriously difficult to unravel, as are its consequences for the rationality of religious belief. The secondary literature has generally coalesced around two interpretations of Bayle's conception of reason. The “superskeptical” interpretation holds that reason is the source of its own undoing, not to be trusted; religious belief turns out to be irrational on this conception of reason, but this is hardly cause for alarm. The jusqu'au bout (to the very end) interpr…Read more
  •  31
    Amyraut on Reason and Religious Belief
    Modern Schoolman 88 (3-4): 191-200. 2011.
    Moses Amyraut’s 1640 work On the Elevation of Faith and the Humbling of Reason is often misread as advocating the position suggested by its title. In fact, Amyraut constructs a tripartite classification of religious beliefs according to their relation to reason, such that he can affirm truths that are incomprehensible to reason, while maintaining that reason is the ultimate ground of their truth. He divides religious truths into those delivered by reason, those consistent with reason, and thos…Read more
  •  27
    Bayle, Jurieu, and the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique by Mara van der Lugt (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (3): 547-548. 2017.
    Scholars in history and philosophy know the extraordinary difficulty of producing original research that is simultaneously creative, well-documented, and methodologically rigorous. But this is exactly what Mara van der Lugt manages in her recent book, a comprehensive treatment of Pierre Bayle's magnum opus. Reading Bayle is not for the faint of heart; he is a complex thinker with a controversial legacy. Van der Lugt exhibits appropriate caution, and though other interpreters have professed simil…Read more
  •  25
    Bayle, Pierre
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.
    Pierre Bayle Pierre Bayle was a seventeenth-century French skeptical philosopher and historian. He is best known for his encyclopedic work The Historical and Critical Dictionary, a work which was widely influential on eighteenth-century figures such as Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson. Bayle is traditionally described as a skeptic, though … Continue reading Bayle, Pierre →
  •  23
    Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (review)
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (2): 137-140. 2017.
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  •  21
    Bayle est souvent considéré comme sceptique, mais sa conception de la raison n’est pas toujours claire ; ce qui en revanche est clair, c’est qu’il manifeste une profonde méfiance à l’égard des capacités de la raison de livrer une connaissance certaine. Cependant, une nouvelle interprétation de Bayle comme rationaliste « stratonicien » a été développée par Gianluca Mori, qui donne une description détaillée de Bayle comme philosophe critique désireux de rendre compte de toutes positions possibles …Read more
  •  18
    Les Lumières de Leibniz: Controverses avec Huet, Bayle, Regis et More by Mogens Lærke (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (2): 338-339. 2016.
    The historiography of philosophy is a hot topic these days. One need only peruse the 2013 Philosophy and Its History, edited by Mogens Lærke, Justin E. H. Smith, and Eric Schliesser, or this journal’s debate between Daniel Garber and Michael Della Rocca, to see that methodological issues in the history of philosophy are the subject of substantive contemporary discussion. In the volume under review, Lærke defends an approach to the historiography of philosophy that is fundamentally inseparable fr…Read more
  •  1
    This dissertation develops an original interpretation of the relationship between reason and religious belief in the work of Pierre Bayle, a seventeenth-century skeptic, that I call “philosophical fideism.” The underdetermined, and often paradoxical, nature of Bayle’s writing makes interpreting him a formidable task; I therefore begin by sketching out the contemporary interpretive landscape of Bayle studies, currently deeply divided over the issue of Bayle’s conception of the reason-faith relat…Read more
  • Which "reason"? Bayle on the intractability of evil
    In Larry M. Jorgensen & Samuel Newlands (eds.), New Essays on Leibniz’s Theodicy, Oxford University Press. 2014.