Percorsi anticartesiani nelle lettere a Pierre-Daniel Huet (review)

Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) was one of the great érudits of the Classical Age in France: littérateur, scientist, geographer, bishop, courtier, and, not incidentally, philosopher. He published what is perhaps the most comprehensive, unrelenting, and devastating critiques of Cartesianism ever: the Censura philosophiae cartesianae (1689), which went through five editions in as many years. Such was Huet's stature that widespread and spirited reply from the Cartesian partisans was assured. In France, the principal rebuttal was Pierre-Sylvain Regis's Réponse (1691), in turn guaranteeing a further attack from Huet, which took two forms. One was the significantly expanded last edition of the Censura (1694), the additions to which suddenly break off part way through the work. It seems that Huet at that point decided that the most effective refutation of the Cartesians lay less in philosophical than rhetorical terms. He in any case produced the satirical Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du cartésianisme (1692), the premise of which is that, reports of his death in Sweden notwithstanding, Descartes was still alive there in the North, teaching philosophy to the Laps. Rapetti's book is occasioned by correspondence relating to this important but generally neglected chapter in the history of philosophy.

Many years ago, the late Richard H. Popkin drew attention to Huet's vast amount of still unpublished ms material (Year Book of the American Philosophical Society, 1959, esp. 449). A full understanding of Huet's historical significance, he said, would depend on collating this material, which is dispersed throughout Europe. The job remains to be done; but a start has been made by Rapetti. In particular, Popkin drew attention to the Carteggio Huet, Ashburnham Ms. 1866, in Florence's Bibliotecca Laurenziana, which contains over three thousand items. All of the correspondence published here comes from this source.

The title of the book is rather misleading. To be sure, the guiding thread is anti-Cartesianism, but the letters themselves occupy only a little over a tenth of the total volume. Following an introduction, the work is divided into six chapters, each primarily on one author, whose correspondence, usually a matter merely of congratulating and thanking Huet for his work, is attached as an appendix. The real value of the book is in each chapter itself, in which Rapetti discusses the significance of the author as emblematic of the aversion from Cartesianism. Four of the authors are Jesuits, whose society Descartes had cultivated, almost entirely without success, in his effort to replace Aristotle as the Philosopher.

The first chapter illustrates the nature of the book. Appended to it are four inconsequential letters from René Rapin that do not so much as mention Descartes or Cartesianism. But in his Reflexions sur la philosophie ancienne et moderne (1676) is found a general condemnation of all philosophy, eo ipso false, that is not based on faith. Rapetti uses it and other material to develop the role of the honnête homme in these debates. A second Jesuit was Louis Le Valois, who had already attacked the Cartesians' mechanistic explanation of the Eucharist and their voluntarist account of eternal truth. His letter is insignificant, but included is a set of annotations on a ms copy of Huet's posthumous De imbecillitate mentis humanae. The Jesuit Charles de La Rue is also discussed in this chapter on Huet's argumentative strategy (Huet reports that it was conversation with some Jesuits, unnamed, that led him to publish the Nouveaux mémoires, composed only as a diversion). The final Jesuit is Antoine Boschet, whose brief note offers support to Huet in the inevitable counterattacks of the Cartesians. The context for this chapter is Baillet's Vie de Monsieur Descartes and the anti-Cartesian satirical literature such as Daniel's Voyage du monde de Descartes.

The letters of the Academic skeptic Simon Foucher seem to me...