ABSTRACT
Perhaps more than any other fi gure in the early modern period, Pierre Bayle’s vast oeuvre has been the object of a bewildering variety of interpretations. In the three centuries since his death, Bayle has been alternately read as a skeptic, deist, fi deist, atomist, atheist, Calvinist, Jew, Manichean, and a good deal more. If recent years have seen a winnowing of the fi eld of interpretations, the disagreement surrounding them has only intensifi ed. In the English-speaking world Bayle has been widely regarded as a skeptic, although precisely what kind of skeptic has been a matter of dispute. In the introduction to his translation of the Dictionnaire, Richard Popkin characterizes that work as a “Summa Sceptica”, arguing that Bayle’s skepticism is most closely aligned with Pyrrhonism of a sort without clear precedent in the modern era.1 While acknowledging the infl uence of the French skeptical tradition, Popkin emphasizes the fundamental differences that separate Bayle from the leading fi gures of that school. Unlike Montaigne whose Apology for Raymond Sebond relied heavily on the standard skeptical tropes that aim to call into question the adequacy of sense perception and reason as a foundation of knowledge, Bayle undertook to refute every theory individually and “on its own terms.”2 As Popkin portrays it, Bayle’s modus operandi is to adopt provisionally, as a kind of dato non concesso, the principles and presuppositions of his dogmatic opponents in order to lay bare the inconsistencies and contradictions latent in their system. Still, not content to refute the particular theory under discussion, Bayle uses the occasion “to generalize the attack to all theories and to show the hopeless abysses to which all human intellectual endeavors lead.”3 Thus, in both its aims and achievements Bayle’s philosophical activity is, in Popkin’s view, wholly destructive. Indeed, such is the scope of Bayle’s Pyrrhonism that the result is nothing less than “the utter and total reductio ad absurdum (quite literally) of all of our intellectual pretensions.”4
