Pierre Bayle's Correspondence and Its Significance for the History of Ideas

The complete scholarly edition of Bayle's correspondence adds many new and intriguing details to our knowledge of his career, associates, and preoccupations. However, Bayle was always guarded and cautious about his innermost thoughts and purposes; many of his core concerns and commitments remain veiled from our view. Thus the continuing basic disagreement in recent scholarly literature about him—was he ultimately a committed Protestant, Pyrronist skeptic, atheist, or "Spinozist"'?—is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. Even so, there are grounds for arguing that the scholarly edition provides evidence that does enable us to considerably narrow that disagreement.