Devoir de Philosophie

Buffier, Claude

Publié le 22/02/2012

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A French Jesuit who flourished in the early eighteenth century, Buffier developed an outlook that he referred to as common-sense philosophy. While deeply influenced by the philosophies of Descartes and Locke, he saw their reliance on the testimony of inner experience to be conducive to scepticism concerning the external world. In reaction to this, he sought to establish the irrevocable claims of various 'first truths', which pointed towards external reality and qualified it in various respects. His work anticipates certain themes that surfaced later in the common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid. Buffier was born in Poland to French parents. He pursued his studies in the Jesuit college at Rouen, and entered there as a novitiate at the age of 18. His career was spent almost entirely at the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, first as a teacher then, after 1699, as 'scriptor', a position that enabled him to devote all his energies to writing. He wrote extensively on philosophy, geography, history, and grammar (often in verse, to facilitate memorization) and made important contributions to the Dictionnaire de Trévoux and the Mémoires de Trévoux.

« I possess something I call intelligence and something independent of this intelligence that I call my body; The presence of design, such as we find in a watch, requires an intelligent designer; The self or soul is absolutely one; I possess a free will. While Buffier does recognize certain differences between the claims of outer and inner experience, he refuses simply to place them on the same scale and declare the former to be weaker than the latter.

Instead, he will say that both are equally 'certain' , although through inner experience we grasp truths with greater 'vividness'; or that to deny inner experience would take one out of 'oneself' , while to deny our outer experience would place one outside 'reason' (by leaving one with no ultimate premises to reason from); or that denial of the former might lead to contradiction, but denial of the latter would indicate some form of madness (taking one outside the domain of reasonability).

The exigencies of life, in short, require us to accept and live in accord with the dictates of common sense. Buffier accepts calling such truths innate ideas, if we mean by this that they constitute certain dispositions by which the mind grasps reality.

However, he rejects any belief in innate ideas ( Innate knowledge ) if these are construed as particular items standing permanently before the mind for contemplation.

In fact Buffier rejects the very conception of ideas as 'things' that stand before the mind, regarding them instead purely as modifications of our soul in so far as it is thinking, which suggests that the mind, when it receives an idea, is no more distinguishable from that idea than a ball set in motion is distinguishable from the motion it receives.

This point, touched upon but lightly by Buffier, was to become the very focus of Reid's critique of the 'ideal system' (see Reid, T. ). Noticeably absent from Buffier's list of first truths is any that makes mention of God's existence.

He believed, rather, that this particular truth followed reasonably from the first truth by which we infer the existence of an intelligent designer from the observation of design in an object.

Quite generally, where philosophical and scientific questions are concerned, Buffier maintains an empiricist's reserve, deploring such speculative excesses as one finds in Descartes ' physics or Malebranche 's metaphysics.

And while his principal philosophical priority involves overcoming the hyperbolic scepticism associated with solipsism, he freely affirms our ignorance of the ultimate causal forces at work in the universe.

The essences of things that we can know are but nominal essences, while real essences stand beyond our reach - real essences being understood by Buffier not as those that ground the qualities of a given substance, but as those that render an individual truly unique.

Out of this ignorance, however, emerges an emphasis on the important position occupied by probability ( vraisemblance ) in forming sound opinions and making judicious decisions.. »

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