Abstract
In his celebrated History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, Richard Popkin treats Pierre-Daniel Huet as above all an heir to ancient Pyrrhonism. This interpretation is currently being counterbalanced by readings of the influence of Academic scepticism on seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, some of which go as far as to treat Pierre-Daniel Huet as a central figure in the revival of Academic scepticism. In this paper, I argue that it appears difficult to treat Huet as a disciple of either Pyrrhonism or Academic scepticism, because he made use of both these kinds of scepticism in a purely strategic manner. To demonstrate this point, it is essential to approach the meaning of his scepticism by inquiring into the sources available to him, and next to inquire into the use he made of it, in particular within his apologetic reflections focused on the relationship between faith and reason. Only in this way can we arrive at a clear view of his relationship with ancient scepticism, whether Pyrrhonian or Academic.
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Notes
- 1.
Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 278–282.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 274–278.
- 3.
Thomas Lennon, “The Skepticism of Huet’s Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain”, in Marc André Bernier and Sébastien Charles (eds.), Scepticisme et modernité (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2005), p. 65–75. On this score, Lennon points out that he is not the first to take a stand against an over-Pyrrhonian reading of Huet’s scepticism and cites in passing the early work of Abbé Flottes (Jean Baptiste Marcel Flottes, Étude sur Daniel Huet, évêque d’Avranches [Montpellier: F. Seguin, 1857]).
- 4.
José Raimundo Maia Neto, “Huet n’est pas un sceptique chrétien”, Les études philosophiques, 2(2), 2008, p. 209–222, 221. See also the same author’s “Academic Skepticism in Early Modern Philosophy”, Journal of the History of Ideas 58(2), 1997, p. 199–220, and “Huet sceptique cartésien”, Philosophiques, 35(1), 2008, p. 223–239.
- 5.
On this topic, see the illuminating article by Françoise Pélisson-Karro, “La bibliothèque de Pierre-Daniel Huet, évêque d’Avranches, entre la maison professe des Jésuites et la bibliothèque du Roi”, in Bruno Blaselle and Laurent Portes (eds.), Mélanges autour de l’histoire des livres imprimés et périodiques (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1998), p. 107–130.
- 6.
On this topic, see the sections “La ripresa dello scetticismo antico” and “Huet e la tradizione scettica” in Elena Rapetti, Pierre-Daniel Huet: erudizione, filosofia, apologetica (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1999), p. 255–279.
- 7.
Pierre-Daniel Huet, Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain (Amsterdam: Henri du Sauzet, 1723); the English version used for quoted passages in this article is Pierre-Daniel Huet, A Philosophical Treatise Concerning the Weakness of Human Understanding, tr. unkn. (London: Gysbert Dommer, 1725). The passages quoted from this translation feature some spellings that are no longer current.
- 8.
Huet, Treatise, p. 83; p. 109–110 in the original French edition.
- 9.
Ibid. p. 83–84; p. 110 in the original French edition.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 102–103, with final sentence of quotation supplied in square brackets because omitted in the published translation; p. 136 in the original French edition.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 90; p. 119 in the original French edition.
- 12.
Cf. Simon Foucher, Dissertations sur la Recherche de la vérité, contenant l’histoire et les principes de la philosophie des Académiciens (Paris; Jean Anisson, 1693), p. 154–157, regarding Arcesilaus’ “dogmas”; and ibid., p. 157–161, regarding Carneades’ “dogmas”. See also the same author’s Dissertation sur la Recherche de la vérité, contenant l’apologie des Académiciens (Paris: Estienne Michallet, 1687), p. 25–36.
- 13.
Huet, Treatise, p. 104 ff; p. 138 ff in the original French edition.
- 14.
I am following the dating proposed by José Raimundo Maia Neto, which strikes me as plausible, as well as the same scholar’s proposed sequence of presentation in light of his discovery at the Bibliothèque nationale de France of a manuscript which is explicit on this point (BnF, ms. lat. 11443). Cf. Maia Neto, “Huet n’est pas un sceptique chrétien”, p. 213: “Huet’s abortive original philosophical project can be summed up as follows: (1) a settling of accounts with Cartesianism, first (in the Treatise) by separating the good part (doubt), which can be turned to good account providing it is uprooted from its original philosophical context, from the bad part (metaphysics), which, as an obstacle to Huet’s project, is attacked in Against Cartesian Philosophy; and (2) in the three published books of the Alnetanae Quaestiones, the sceptical (in a non-philosophical sense) and learned (historical) reconciliation with Christian faith of a reason that would henceforward be stripped of pretentions to truth.” It is possible that Huet subsequently considered altering the order of the parts: in a letter to Pirot dated 2 May 1692, he treats the Treatise as the fourth part of the Quæstiones and not the first. The key point to remember, however, is that his recourse to scepticism can only be understood within an apologetic frame of reference.
- 15.
Pierre-Daniel Huet, Censura philosophiae cartesianae (Paris: Jean Anisson, 1694); the English version used for quoted passages in this article is Pierre-Daniel Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, tr. Thomas M. Lennon (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2003).
- 16.
See Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, I, 14, p. 109–110; p. 27 in the original Latin edition: “Therefore, when Descartes wrote in his Discourse on the Method that in beginning his philosophy, and in resolving to begin on the basis of doubt, he had not intended that it should be done in the fashion of the skeptics, ‘who doubt,’ he says, ‘for the sake of doubting, and seek noting beyond uncertainty,’ but that he brought his doubts to a halt in the perfectly certain knowledge of this principle, ‘I am thinking, therefore I am’ – when he wrote this, I say, he began to go astray as soon as he departed from the skeptics. Both he and they saw that it was necessary to doubt. But he left off doubting just when it was most necessary to doubt, namely, at a principle that is no less uncertain that all the others that he subjected to doubt. They persist in doubting that same principle, which they saw as especially in need of doubt, doubting not at all just for the sake of doubting (which Descartes would not have accused them of, if he had more diligently examined their reasons).” Huet returns to this question of doubt being restricted to philosophy and not being applied to day-to-day life on page 105 of an unpublished manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (fonds français 14703) entitled Censure de la Réponse faite par M. Régis au livre intitulé Censura philosophiae cartesianae (Against the Reply by Monsieur Régis to the book called Censura philosophiae cartesianae; hereafter Against the Reply). Here and below, my page references for citations of this manuscript respect the manuscript’s own pagination.
- 17.
Huet, Against the Reply, p. 14–15.
- 18.
Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, I, 6, p. 75, p. 28 in the original French edition, and Against the Reply, p. 28. (Huet here refers to the Academica II, 98 and 143, where Cicero explains how this proposition is problematic and mentions the debates that had taken place between Diodorus Cronus, Philo, and Chrysippus, on the truth value of the proposition.)
- 19.
See ibid., I, 8, p. 80–81; p. 34 in the original Latin edition: “He evaluated the axioms of geometry and found them to be true; others no less learned evaluated them and rejected them as false. Just as Descartes examined this proposition ‘things equal to a third thing are equal to each other,’ and took it to be true, so Carneades, a man in no way inferior to Descartes, or rather in many ways far superior to him, examined it and took it to be false.”
- 20.
Huet, Against the Reply, p. 48. (On this score, Huet cites Galen, De optima doctrina, ch. 2).
- 21.
Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, I, 11, p. 97; p. 54 in the original Latin edition.
- 22.
See Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy I, 11, p. 98; p. 54 in the original Latin edition: “Is it not known by itself that things equal to a third thing are equal to each other? It is nevertheless false according to Carneades and therefore unknown to him and in need of proof. But what we read in the books of the Cartesians, that the proposition ‘I am’ and even the argument ‘I am thinking, therefore I am’ are axioms, is ridiculous and deserving of great guffaws, and it shows the colossal ignorance of this sect.”
- 23.
For an analysis of Huet’s critique of the evidence of the cogito, see my “Évidence, vraisemblance et vérité selon Huet : le cartésianisme en question” in N. Vienne-Guérin and J.-P. Schandeler (eds.), Les usages de la preuve d’Henri Estienne à Jeremy Bentham (Paris: Hermann, 2014), p. 101–117.
- 24.
See Huet, Against the Reply, p. 102–103: “But besides, I say that, since there is no axiom at all nor no truth so constant that it cannot be subjected to some contradiction, there are none at all that can need no proof, and in consequence no argument, to be proven. The Academics and the skeptics, Democritus and the whole school of Epicurus, rejected the principles of geometry. Carneades denied that two dimensions equal to a third were necessarily equal to each other. Certain other philosophers have denied that the whole is greater than its part. This is what obliged Apollonius of Perga to prove the truth of the principles of geometry. Even though those principles were known by natural light, does that knowledge mean that Appolonius’ arguments were not arguments, when his reason had gone to such extraordinary lengths to invent them? My natural light teaches me that I am a human being, just as it teaches me that I am. If nevertheless I apply the following argument to prove it, namely, ‘Every rational animal is a human being; I am a rational animal; therefore I am a human being,’ does that not merit the name of argument just because I knew the conclusion in another way?”
- 25.
Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, VIII, 8, p. 219; p. 189–190 in the original Latin edition.
- 26.
See Huet, Treatise, I, 1, p. 16–17; p 20–21 in the original Latin edition: “When therefore I affirm that man cannot know the truth with certainty, I would be thus understood, that man in this life cannot come at the knowledge of the truth with that supreme certitude to which nothing is wanting in order to its utmost perfection, but that he may know it with a human certainty, such as it has pleased God our understanding should be capable of whilst he is tied to this mortal body …. For the grace of God, through Faith, does supply what is wanting in human nature, in order to our having such a perfect knowledge of things, it fortifies the weakness of our reason and senses dispels the darkness of doubt, and upholds our fickle and staggering minds.”
- 27.
Alessandro Dini, “Anticartesianesimo e apologetica in Pierre-Daniel Huet”, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 23, 1987, p. 236.
- 28.
Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, Preface, p. 64; p. 15 in the original French edition.
- 29.
On this topic, see Ch. 15 of Book III of the Treatise.
- 30.
Frédéric Brahami, Le travail du scepticisme. Montaigne, Bayle, Hume (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), p. 95.
- 31.
Huet was especially critical of Malebranche, who, in The Search after Truth, grants no significance to the historical method. This accounts for Huet’s somewhat harsh comment written, by way of preamble, into his own copy of Malebranche’s book: “He scorns all the fields of learning that he lacks, and he lacks many and in fact nearly all of them” (qtd. by A. Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz. Relations personnelles [Paris: Vrin, 1955], p. 31). On Huet and Malebranche, see Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, “Huet lecteur de Malebranche”, XVII e siècle, 37(2), 1985, p. 169–189, and Thomas Lennon, “Huet, Malebranche and the Birth of Skepticism”, in Gianni Paganini (ed.), The Return of Scepticism: From Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle [Dordrecht: Springer, 2003], p. 149–165.
- 32.
Descartes, Lettre à Mersenne du 16 octobre 1639, in Œuvres de Descartes, éd. Adam et Tannery, CNRS-Vrin, Paris 1964–1974, vol. II, p. 597–598.
- 33.
I have borrowed this expression from Germain Malbreuil, “Les droits de la raison et de la foi, la dissociation de la raison, la métamorphose de la foi selon Pierre-Daniel Huet”, XVII e siècle, 37(2), 1985, p. 126.
- 34.
Huet, Alnetanæ Quæstiones, I, 2, § 7, p. 30.
- 35.
See Huet, Treatise, I, 10, p. 65; p. 86–87 in the original Latin edition: “[T]his doubt is of such weight, that it must hinder us from receiving any proposition as certain, whilst we make use of our reason; and Descartes is so far from having overthrown it, that I cannot see how it can be even shaken, unless faith comes to the help of reason.” On this topic, see also Against Cartesian Philosophy, I, 12, and Against the Reply, art. 12.
- 36.
Jean-Robert Massimi, “Vérité et histoire chez P.-D. Huet”, XVII e siècle, 37(2), 1985, p. 168.
- 37.
And this is what José Raimundo Maia Neto refuses to do in “Huet n’est pas un sceptique chrétien” (Les études philosophiques, 2, 2008, 209–222), but based on a different perspective. See also Smith (2009) for a criticism of the idea of a Christian sceptic.
- 38.
The ABC, a sceptical dialogue by Voltaire dating from 1768 (in which the tenth conversation deals with the topic of religion), is in fact presented by Voltaire as having been translated from the English by Huet.
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Charles, S. (2017). Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Readings in Scepticism. In: Smith, P., Charles, S. (eds) Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 221. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45424-5_12
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