Abstract

LAURSEN, John Christian. Pierre Bayle: el pirronismo contra la razón en el commentaire philosophique. Rev. latinoam. filos. [online]. 2010, vol.36, n.1, pp.35-58. ISSN 1852-7353.

Recent work on Pierre Bayle interprets him as a full-blooded rationalist, but this article argues that he may just as well be interpreted as the opposite, a Pyrrhonian skeptic. There are indeed at least two sides of the argument in almost everything he wrote. Bayle's Philosophical Commentary of 1686, widely accepted as one of the greatest defenses of religious toleration in the history of philosophy, contains just such a tension between rationality and skepticism. This can be understood as a distinct and valuable approach to philosophy, comparable to the method of other writers in the skeptical tradition such as Sextus Empircus and Montaigne. To make the case that it succeeds in defending toleration requires a charitable interpretation.

Keywords : Skepticism; Pyrrohonism; Rationalism; Toleration; Pierre Bayle.

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