Abstract

Antoine Arnauld, a philosopher and theologian whose life spans the century , set his mind to epistemological matters early on in his career in 1640 with his Fourth Objections to Descartes' Meditations , and renewed the debate with Descartes in his 1648 New Objections. Arnauld's concerted views are expressed in the 1662 Port-Royal Logic and can also be found in later works, the Examen and On True and False Ideas . Arnauld's fundamentally Cartesian epistemology maps out the areas in which religious institutions have authority, and the areas in which reason is sole, legitimate arbitre. Importantly, his philosophy of ideas avoids crude theories of truth by resemblance or correspondence by focusing on the fact that ideas are always clothed in words and making this a central part of the system. Arnauld's epistemology is in fact innovatively linguistic, attending much more to the process of establishing a body of knowledge than to the end-result, and therefore identifying all the errors and pitfalls that can occur in this process, very widely defined to include social, historical and psychological context, rather than seeking to provide eternal criteria of truth. Despite Arnauld's interest in matters religious, his epistemology is individualistic and reason-centred, in what we argue is a typically modern way. There is also a contemporary flavour to some aspects of Arnauld's epistemology, which ultimately fails, we also show, to resolve some of the issues endemic to a philosophy of ideas, as becomes clear in a comparison with approaches such as Wittgenstein's