Théodore Jouffroy's Contributions to the Common Sense Tradition

Notes and Discussions Th6odore Jouffroy's Contributions the Common Sense Tradition to New editions of Reid's books and recent commentaries on his work, plus his influence on recent and contemporary philosophers like Ducasse, Chisholm, Lehrer, and Duggan, to name only a few, have placed the Scot, where he has always belonged, in the mainstream of philosophical thought. This revival of interest has carried over to subsequent members of the commonsense tradition who were influenced by Reid, including Stewart, Beattie, Witherspoon, Tappan, Mahan, McCosh, Royer-Collard, Cousin and, peripherally, Sir William Hamilton? Th6odore Jouffroy (1796--184~), a younger colleague of Royer-Collard and Cousin at Paris, also belongs to this tradition , though the nature of his contributions to it has not as yet been sufficiently clarified. Indeed, his work sometimes is badly misrepresented? Jouffroy contributed significantly to the metaphilosophy of common sense. Reid had insisted that any philosophy which contravenes the truth of ordinary propositions leads to absurdities which stem from some false premise; Jouffroy added that any philosophy which violates the meaning of ordinary concepts also leads to absurdities which stem from the misuse of language. Jouffroy had helpful things to say as well about Reid's metaphilosophical distinction between the self-evident and the evident . Moreover, he produced a first-rate criticism of classical skepticism, an archenemy of the common sense tradition. Finally, he translated Reid's complete works and Stewart's Outlines of Moral Philosophy, the prefaces to which, amounting to hundreds of pages, are skillful defenses of the Scot's "introspection of consciousness. ''3 Along ' For the ambiguous role played by Hamilton in the commonsense tradition see E. H. Madden, "Sir William Hamilton, Critical Philosophy, and the Commonsense Tradition," Review ofMetaphysics38 (a985): 839-66. For example, George Boas, "Th6odore Simon Jouffroy," TheEncyclopediaofPhilosophy,ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press), 4: ~94. Boas characterizes Jouffroy as a skeptic when in fact the Frenchman elaborately criticized and rejected this view. 3 OEuvrescompletesde ThomasReid, publi6es par M. Th. Jouffroy, avec des Fragments de M. Royer-Collard et une introduction de l'6diteur (Paris: Victor Masson, 1828-36); Esquissesde philosophie morale,par M. Dugald Stewart, traduit de l'anglais par Th. Jouffroy (Paris: A. Johanneau , 18~6). [573] 574 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~5:4 OCT 1987 with Cousin, Jouffroy made the common sense tradition dominant in France for many years, and along with Reid, Stewart, Hamilton, and Cousin made it dominant in the United States for four decades. Jouffroy also held an "eclectic" viewpoint, akin to Cousin's, according to which every philosophy contains a partial truth, a viewpoint which seems dissonant, if not inconsistent, with the Reidian tradition. We shall argue, however, that appearances are deceiving and that Jouffroy's eclecticism, far from being dissonant, is conceptually connected with his semantical addition to the metaphilosophy of common sense. Jouffroy considered in great detail the work of Reid and Stewart and numerous other philosophers, as well as all the major philosophical systems. It is impossible to give a detailed exposition of his voluminous writings, but we can distill from them five central themes which capture his world view and show the significance of his contributions to the common sense tradition. 1. For the most part Jouffroy accepted the metaphilosophy of the common sense tradition , according to which elementary concepts and judgments are derived from two sources, the first consisting of observation (both the perception of external objects and events and the introspection of states of consciousness) and the second consisting of reason, as distinct from discursive reasoning, which supplies the apriori principles of common sense by virtue of the nativistic structure of the mind itself. Such principles are not what ordinary people happen to believe at a given time but what, given the common epistemic input, they, along with philosophers when off duty, cannot help but believe at any time. The principles of common sense formulated within the tradition were many and diverse, though the following were generally accepted: "an appearance cannot exist without being the appearance of something not itself an appearance"; "tables and chairs, like all extended objects, exist independently of being perceived"; "the existence of objects and events presupposes space and...