Conscience et réalité: Études sur la philosophie française au XVIIIe siècle (review)

This collection of articles by Bernard Baertschi, a specialist on Maine de Biran and eighteenth-century epistemology, consists of ten studies, most of which were published in philosophical journals between 1983 and 2000. They cover some of the same ground as his very useful book Les Rapports de l'âme et du corps: Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran (Paris, Vrin, 1992) but from a slightly different angle, as they concentrate mainly on the questions of knowledge and consciousness. Beginning with animal mechanism in Descartes and some of its eighteenth-century reverberations, the book goes on to deal with Condillac (the subject of three studies), Lelarge de Lignac, Jean-Bernard Mérian, Diderot, the Idéologues and Maine de Biran. As Baertschi concedes in his Introduction, although they have been to some extent reworked for inclusion in this volume, each of these studies retains a separate identity rather than being chapters in a single work. Nevertheless, the subject-matter, centring around the dual heritage of Descartes and Locke, and the wider comparisons included in most of the studies of individual authors (the Idéologues or Maine de Biran appear in several of them) provide the volume with considerable coherence. Baertschi's close reading of texts in order to bring out their implications and to situate them in the history of philosophical preoccupations is generally enlightening. He succeeds in presenting clearly the philosophical issues and in showing how texts reverberate with each other and with wider preoccupations. It is, however, surprising that he takes very little notice of much of the more recent critical work on these same themes. For example, 'Condillac et la question de Molyneux' ignores the articles and books on Molyneux's question which might have allowed him to situate Condillac's attitude in a wider context. 'L'athéisme de Diderot' (which also ignores the considerable body of recent work on Diderot), while bringing out many of the issues involved in the Philosophe's critique of Cartesianism and discussion of the properties of matter, does not take account of the distinction made by Diderot between 'déiste' and 'théiste' or of the progression of his thought. Or again, the influence accorded to Diderot in 'La question du libre arbitre dans l'Idéologie' misrepresents the earlier debate and in particular the importance of Collins, mentioned in passing. Baertschi is clearly most at home in the Revolutionary period, and many readers may find frustrating the fact that he is much less concerned with the historical and non-philosophical context of works from earlier in the century. Given this limitation, his book provides much that is stimulating and throws light on some of the philosophical questions that preoccupied eighteenth-century French thinkers.