Catharine Macaulay's Republican Enlightenment by Karen Green (review)

Abstract

and Locke; furthermore, it is foundational, both to Buffier’s “psychologie rationnelle” and to Buffier’s notion of common sense (32–42). If the first foundational principle of truth is “sens intime” or “sentiment intérieur,” then “sens commun” is the second (47). Because of the inevitable limits of logic and speculative reason, and because of our intimate sense of ourselves as a union of soul and body, Buffier maintains that an intersubjective common sense “se fonde sans cesse sur le témoignage des autres” (60). Rouquayrol develops his treatment of Buffier’s notion of common sense with a useful comparison of Buffier and Thomas Reid drawn from his own close readings of the two, as much as from the important study by Louise Marcil-Lacoste, Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers ([Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982], 52–57). Like so many early modern philosophers and érudits of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century studied by Richard Popkin in The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and more recently, Anton Matytsin in The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), the common sense of Buffier proceeded from a species of “practical reason” or “mitigated skepticism,” not as a means of deducing a metaphysical system, but as principles of acting in the world on the basis of practical moral certitude (60). Beyond its instructive front matter and scholarly bibliography, the Rouquayrol edition of Buffier’s Traité des premières vérités also includes the less well-known appendix to the 1732 edition of the Traité (291–306); Buffier’s earlier and separately published remarks on the metaphysical principles of Descartes (307–17); his remarks on the metaphysics of John Locke published in response to Pierre Coste’s first translation of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1700 (318–30); and his “Observations sur la métaphysique du Père Malebranche” published in the latter’s 1712 work, De la recherche de la verité (331–35). As if that were not enough, Rouquayrol publishes Buffier’s observations on the metaphysics of LeClerc (336), the logic of de Crousaz (337–43), and the logic of Pierre Sylvain Régis (344–46). Having all of these scattered reflections by the famed Jesuit philosopher and longtime editor of Mémoires de Trévoux published in one place will undoubtedly prove immensely useful to many scholars, in a way that enriches what is sure to be the standard edition of Buffier’s Traité des premières vérités for years to come. J e f f r e y D . B u r s o n Georgia Southern University