In his Own Words: Recent Publications of Bayle's Writing

Pierre Bayle. Témoin et Conscience de son temps. Un choix d'articles du Dictionnaire historique et critique . Presentés et edités par Antony McKenna (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001). Pp. 459.

Pierre Bayle. Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet . Robert C. Bartlett, trans. and ed. (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000). Pp. xvii + 325. £26.95 paper.

Scholars who interpret the thought of Pierre Bayle sooner or later reach the conclusion that they must allow the philosopher of Rotterdam to speak for himself. They seek to select and publish their favorite texts so that today's reader may engage directly with their author's unique mode of discourse. Each editor—and there have been many of distinction in recent decades including, for example, the late Elisabeth Labrousse, and the historian of skepticism, Richard H. Popkin—seeks to illustrate the extent to which Bayle had a gift for critical argument. Only through exposure to the actual text, they believe, and I think rightly, can a student grasp the virtuosity of the Baylean contribution to the techniques of modern academic discourse. For through it we see his critical method at work, and realize, if we are disposed so to do, that Bayle's method is applicable not only to philosophical and theological metaphysics, but also to the advancement of empirical knowledge in the natural and historical sciences.

Each editor seeks, additionally, to persuade contemporaries that his own interpretation of Bayle's motives—whether relating to toleration, or intellectual freedom, or skeptical epistemology, or Epicureanism, or behavioral anthropology—is just a little different from that of previous interpreters. An editor can, in addition, show how Bayle achieved his effects. He can point out for example, as does Professor McKenna, that as a journalist he sought to reach the widest possible audience. Bayle broke up his text into digestible chunks. He separated fact from opinion, and he provided the references to the sources on which he drew. Nor did he hesitate to use "humour and irony," or investigate scandal, or discuss without embarrassment traditionally "forbidden" subjects such as heresy, violence, and sexually aberrant conduct. Such devices, Bayle believed, not only attracted the reader, they also enabled the philosophic thinker to place in the public domain medical, scientific, or historical findings which hitherto had been known only by a privileged elite.

In the present review, we consider two new editions of writings by Bayle. Anthony McKenna, Professor of Letters at the University Jean Monnet, St-Etienne, has edited for the French reader a new selection of excerpts from the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique.In his introductory remarks he casts a fresh look at Bayle's network of associates and his place in the Huguenot community. Professor McKenna is uniquely placed to perform such a task, for he has for many years worked with others to collect Bayle's Correspondence. (See the review in the foregoing article.) His life of Bayle, which draws on this correspondence, is masterly in offering a succinct but new perspective on Bayle's social and intellectual formation. He reveals how Bayle, an essentially French scholar, consolidated his intellectual self-education in the company of erudite Huguenot colleagues. This grounding took place during the six years he spent at the Academy of Sedan from 1675-1681. He reveals too how Bayle's hopes and expectations were changed after 1681 by the persecution of the Huguenot community by the government of Louis XIV.

As for his criterion for selection, Professor McKenna identifies categories and attempts to represent these categories in his compilation. The Dictionnaire, he notes, devotes articles to theologians (Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran); to sectarians and heretics; to figures from mythology and from the bible; and above all to certain philosophers from classical antiquity including Democritus, Epicurus, Chrysippus, Lucippus, and Pyrrho. Yet, he finds, as do other editors of selected texts from...