Journal of the History of Philosophy

Desmond Clarke adopts a broad understanding of the term ‘philosophy,’ informed by close attention to historical context. He discusses the limitations of early modern philosophy as an academic discipline, plausibly connecting its tendency to conservatism with the fact that philosophy teachers were generally recent graduates, employed for quite short periods, and thus ill-equipped to develop the subject. On the other hand, as he observes, “what is now described as philosophical reasoning or analysis was widely distributed in the publications of lawyers, theologians, natural philosophers, and political commentators” (1). This obliges him to cast his net very wide, far beyond the range of authors one would encounter in a more traditional history of philosophy; and the result of his extensive “excavation[s]” (1) is an extremely stimulating and rewarding book.

The introduction on “Philosophy in Context” stresses further constraints on philosophical activity, such as censorship and the persecution of dissidents, but also mentions the emergence of new institutions, such as academies, offering scope for freer and more innovative philosophical discussion. It is followed by chapters on scepticism, faith and reason, natural philosophy, theories of the mind, ethics, and political philosophy; one would have expected these topics to be covered, but the final chapter, on the equality of the sexes, addresses an issue long and harmfully overlooked; and, over and above the book’s many other merits, the inclusion of this topic is to be especially commended.

This inclusive historical approach does not imply a wholly historical perspective: Clarke sometimes introduces modern insights into his exposition, as when he suggests that scholastic natural philosophers in French colleges were “intuitively aware” of the Duhem/Quine thesis, so they could absorb challenges to their theories from empirical observation (22). He is notably even-handed: in highlighting the problems of the traditional Aristotelian philosophy, he also emphasizes the weaknesses of the alternative solutions propounded by the more innovative authors. The book ends with the twofold conclusion that “it would be impossible to revert to substances and forms as explanatory postulates, and that it would be equally unwarranted to believe that their replacements were not also subject to subsequent possible rejection” (252). Clarke is willing, and rightly, to leave France for purposes of comparison or illustration: the discussion of Pascal on the vacuum is enriched by the comparison with Robert Boyle (112–13). This chapter on natural philosophy is one of the strongest in the book, complicating as it does the idea that new empirical evidence straightforwardly refuted traditional theories.

What emerges from the volume as a whole is a picture of French philosophy that far transcends simplistic labels such as rationalism and empiricism, and stresses the tentative and exploratory aspects of the discourses studied: this is especially clear in the account of scepticism, where the excellent discussions of Francisco Sanches, Pierre Gassendi, and Marin Mersenne emphasize not only the critical but the constructive aspects of their thought. Even in relation to Descartes, Clarke stresses the radical implications of the doctrine of God’s creation of the eternal truths: “eternal truths are necessary only in the sense that God created us in such a way that we perceive them as necessary” (61); no absolute truth is therefore attainable for us. At times he is prepared to advance unorthodox interpretations, as when he argues that “Descartes cannot have proposed substance dualism as a theory of human nature” because of the problems it fails to solve, such as interaction between spiritual substances and bodies (154). But surely this does not prove that Descartes did not uphold the theory. The critical edge is perhaps keenest where Blaise Pascal is concerned, in the chapters on faith and reason and on ethics: Pascal’s claims as to the cognitive impairment due to the Fall are dismissed as ideology, since they cannot be falsified by human evidence (96); but surely Pascal’s contention is that there is enough empirical evidence of our failure, on account of moral and psychological factors, to live up to our rational capacities for it to be worthwhile considering...