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Article: Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706)
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
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BAYLE, PIERRE (1647
–
1706)
BAYLE, PIERRE
(1647
–
1706), French philosopher and critic. Pierre Bayle counts among the most influential and yet most enigmatic thinkers in history. Richard Popkin has described him as the key intellectual figure at the turn of the eighteenth century, and he has come to be known as the "Arsenal of the Enlightenment," the source of its ideas on toleration, secularism, and a host of other issues. Despite the relative clarity of Bayle's effect on his immediate successors, there is very little agreement on what Bayle himself might actually have believed. He is thus in the curious position of having an influence that he himself might not have fully ...