ABSTRACT
For Bayle the seventeenth century is defi ned by Cartesianism, which he considers to be the most sophisticated and compelling Christian philosophy yet devised. Though he praises the genius of a Gassendi or Leibniz, and acknowledges the breadth and power of Spinoza’s philosophical vision, it is the two Cartesians, Descartes and Malebranche, whom Bayle considers to be the greatest philosophers of the age. That Bayle should have placed Descartes at the center of the philosophical landscape comes as no surprise. Descartes’s infl uence in the second half of the seventeenth century was so pervasive as to be felt in nearly every aspect of French intellectual life, and a young professor of philosophy such as Bayle could hardly have been left unaffected. Nor was he alone in his estimation of Malebranche, whose fusion of Cartesian and Augustinian thought Bayle deemed “the work of a superior genius and one of the greatest productions of the human mind.”1
