Pierre Bayle 1647 – 1706

Reading selections from his Dictionary, and his Mohamet Marx and Engels mention:“The man who deprived seventeenth-century metaphysics and metaphysics in general of all credit in the domain of theory was Pierre Bayle. His weapon was scepticism, which he forged out of metaphysics’ own magic formulas. He himself proceeded at first from Cartesian metaphysics. Just as Feuerbach by combat-ing speculative theology was driven further to combat speculative philosophy, precisely because he recognised in speculation the last prop of theology, because he had to force theology to retreat from pseudo-science to crude, repulsive faith, so Bayle too was driven by religious doubt to doubt about the metaphysics which was the prop of that faith. He therefore critically investigated metaphysics in its entire historical development. He became its historian in order to write the history of its death. He refuted chiefly Spinoza and Leibniz. Pierre Bayle not only prepared the reception of material-ism and of…