ABSTRACT
If Malebranche’s system lay at the center of Bayle’s philosophical thought, the infl uence of Leibniz was never more than peripheral. Nevertheless, intellectual relations between the two, which began in the 1680s and ended shortly before Bayle’s death, proved remarkably fruitful. This is particularly true in the case of Leibniz, for whom Bayle served as a welcome critic as well as a conduit by which his views were made available to a wider, French-speaking audience. It was, for example, under Bayle’s editorship of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres that Leibniz published in 1686 his Démonstration courte d’une erreur considerable de M. Descartes.1 The appearance of this article, with its criticism of the Cartesian law of conservation of motion, initiated a debate with Catelan and seems to have exerted some infl uence on Malebranche’s account of the laws of motion. The period between Bayle’s departure from the NRL in 1687 and the publication of the Dictionnaire in 1696 saw little, if any, direct correspondence between the two. However, Leibniz did, through the mediation of their mutual friend Basnage de Beauval, solicit Bayle’s opinion of the Animadversiones in partem generalem principiorum cartesianorum (Critical Thoughts on the General Part of the Principles of Descartes), a criticism of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, which Leibniz was privately circulating.2 Bayle’s brief reply, in which he characteristically defends the Cartesian account of matter as res extensa was communicated to Leibniz by Basnage.3 Leibniz also took an active interest in Bayle’s writings during this period, drafting a set of remarks on the Projet et fragmens d’un Dictionnaire Critique in which Leibniz offers a number of suggestions for improving the utility of the Dictionnaire as originally conceived.4
