Abstract

The philosophical revolution of the seventeenth century was, in part, a concerted attempt to replace Scholastic natural philosophy with a new physical science based on mechanistic principles. The defenders of this mechanistic science shared a conception of metaphysics as an investigation of the non-sensible realm, which in practice amounted to the study of God and the soul. Thus arose the need to forge a new relationship between metaphysics and natural philosophy. Chief among these philosophical reformers was, of course, Descartes who claimed that knowledge of God and the soul is epistemically prior to and foundational for the study of bodies. But also of great importance were the competing materialistic accounts of God and the soul endorsed by Hobbes and Gassendi. ;Writing at the close of the seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle was officially skeptical about the attempt to provide a definitive account of the truths of metaphysics. Indeed, in his principal work, the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, Bayle seems to argue that every attempt to arrive at a rational understanding of the world is doomed to failure. As a result Bayle urges the abandonment of rational inquiry in favor of divine revelation. ;Understandably these dual themes of skepticism and fideism have been the central focus of most recent scholarly work on Bayle. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that Bayle was a reluctant skeptic who was profoundly influenced by Descartes and Malebranche. In particular, Bayle sees such fundamental metaphysical tenets as occasionalism, mind-body dualism, and the Cartesian ontology of substance as both philosophically sound and singularly capable of securing the truths of religion. ;Among the contemporary theories Bayle subjects to critical scrutiny are Leibniz's pre-established harmony, Locke's claim that matter might think, and perhaps most famously Spinoza's substance monism. In addition to the intrinsic importance these refutations have for early modern philosophy, an examination of these criticisms will reveal the existence of certain deep philosophical commitments that his more familiar skeptical arguments have tended to obscure