The Protestant Critics of Bayle at the Dawn of the Enlightenment

Abstract

The learned world of the early-eighteenth century encountered a veritable crisis of confidence in man’s ability to know the surrounding world with any degree of certainty. Thinkers who attempted to strengthen or to construct anew the epistemological foundations of human knowledge saw the skepticism of Pierre Bayle as the most dangerous challenge to their project. This paper discusses the ways in which two Huguenot critics of Bayle, Swiss logician Jean-Pierre de Crousaz and Amsterdam theologian David Renaud Boullier, attempted to answer the arch-Pyrrhonist’s skeptical arguments, thereby revealing the dynamics of the interaction between skeptical and rationalist thought in the early Enlightenment.