Abstract
Two of the last of the philosophes, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville and the Marquis de Condorcet, carried skepticism beyond the usual moderate view of the preceding philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment.
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Malgré les occupations dont je suis accablé dans ce moment-ci, j’ai parcouru le plan que vous m’avez addressé; j’y ai vu que l’auteur avait beaucoup d’érudition, et de philosophie. Si je ne crois pas entièrement comme vous au pyrrhonisme universel, je suis persuadé qu’il y a beaucoup d’incertitude dans les sciences.“ Published in Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Mémoires de Brissot, ed. M. de Lescure (Paris, 1877 ), 99–100.
He met him some time later and decided that d’Alembert, if he had lived longer, would have deserted “la cause de la liberté.” Mémoires,101.
Brissot, Pyrrhon,Paris: Archives nationales, 446/AP/21. I am most grateful to my friend, Laurence Bongie, and my son, Jeremy Popkin, who first alerted me to the existence of this document, and gave me enough indication of its contents to lead me to rush off to examine it in 1992 when I was in Paris.
Both printings were published at Neuchâtel by the Imprimerie de la Société typographique. The second edition says on the title page that it exactly conforms to the original edition.
Brissot, Mémoires,168. He also said it was the work of a happy man, anxious to communicate his message to like-minded souls.
After surveying the sciences, even offering a dialogue between a Newtonian and a skeptic (De la verité [Neuchâtel, 1782], 333–40), Brissot presented his eleventh meditation entitled, “De l’impossibilité que les sciences soient jamais poussées au dernier degré de perfection, & que nous découvrions jamais beaucoup de vérités.” Ibid., 341.
This is the subject of Meditation XII, the last one, “De la nécessité de doute, et mon scepticisme.” Ibid., 356–62.
Giorgio Tonelli, “Pierre-Jacques Changeux and Skepticism in the French Enlightenment,” Stadia Leibnitiana, 55 (1974), 112.
The theories of Berkeley and Malebranche are discussed often in both the book, De la vérité,and in the mss. Pyrrhon. See, for instance, the discussion in the mss. fols. 12–12v.
Ibid., fol. 19v.
Brissot, De la vérité,356–57.
N’en doit on pas conclure que croire peu, douter beaucoup, est le parti du sage.“ Ibid., 357.
Ibid., 359. The reference is to the second book of Emile.
Ezequiel de Olaso, “The Two Scepticisms of the Savoyard Vicar,” The Sceptical Mode of Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Richard H. Popkin,ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (The Hague, 1988), 56. For Hume the voice of nature has been covered up by barbarism, but is becoming evident in more civilized times. Rousseau’s more anarchistic view about civilization leads him to rely on a primitive voice of nature untainted by the arts and sciences, by the so-called civilized world.
Carl Friedrich Stäudlin, a decade later, in his Geschichte und Geist des Skepticismus devoted a good deal of time to examining Rousseau’s skepticism and the effect it had on students in Germany at the time.
First published in the Rivista critica di Storia della Filosofia,4 (1967), 400–17, and reprinted in Richard Popkin, The High Road to Pyrrhonism (Indianapolis, 1993), 161–80.
David Hume, An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature, rpt. and intr. by John M. Keynes and Pierro Sraffa (Cambridge, UK, 1938 ), 24.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, The Philosophical Works,ed. Thomas H. Green and Thomas H. Grose, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1874–75), 1:474–75.
Brissot, De la vérité,359: “scepticisme raisonnable, du bon esprit philosophique.” 2° Ibid., 361 n. 1: “un scepticisme universel, appliqué à toutes les sciences”
Ibid., 362: “Je le sais, je ferai forcé de briser l’idole chérie de ces savans révérés du public, qui croient, qui disent que tout est découvert, qui regardent le doute comme une hérésie, comme un outrage à leur savoir, & presque conune un crime littéraire. Je les vois déjà qui sourient dédaigneusement à mon project. Heureux encore, s’ils se bornent à ce dédain, & s’il n’invoquent pas le secours de l’intrigue & de la persécution, pour soutenir le prestige avec lequel ils éblouissent le public! Mais que peuvent leurs vains efforts contre un homme qui a sa conscience pour lui, qui a la conscience d’être utile un jour, & pour qui n’est rien cette réputation qu’ils s’empresseront le lui enlever.”
Brissot was actually in the United States at the time when the French Revolution began, apparently planning to set up some kind of utopian republic on the frontier.
Review of Brissot, De la vérité, English Review, or an Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, 3 (1784), 301–02.
See Richard H. Popkin, “Condorcet, Abolitionist”, in Condorcet Studies vol. 1, ed. Leonora C. Rosenfield (Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1984), 35–47, and Popkin, “Condorcet’s Epistemology and His Politics,” Knowledge and Politics: Case Studies in the Relationship between Epistemology and Political Philosophy, ed. Marcelo Dascal and Ora Gruengard ( Boulder, Col., 1989 ), 111–24.
This appears in Condorcet’s Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (1785), Condorcet: Selected Writings,ed. and tr. Keith Baker (Indianapolis, 1976), 33.
Hume’s Treatise was not translated into French until the late nineteenth century. Hume’s other writings were available to the French audience.
Keith Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975), 135–55.
Ibid., 129.29 Ibid., ch. 3.
Ibid., and Richard H. Popkin, “Condorcet’s Epistemology and His Politics,” 113–15.
On Condorcet’s knowledge of Hume’s Treatise see Baker, Condorcet,ch. 3, 139–55 and 181ff., and Popkin, “Condorcet and Hume and Turgot,” Condorcet Studies,vol. 2, ed. David Williams (New York, 1987), 47–48.
Condorcet, “Reception Speech at the French Academy,” Condorcet: Selected Writings,ed. Baker, 18.
Ibid.
Ibid., 19.
Baker, Condorcet,44, 74, and 181–82, and Popkin, “Condorcet’s Epistemology and His Politics,” 114. One always has to remember that Condorcet’s most powerful statement of the progress theory and of the perfectibility of mankind was written while the agents of the Reign of Terror were looking for him, and that he died either by his own hand or by execution just after finishing the Esquisse.
Of all of mankind, there are none so pernicious as political projectors, if they have any power, nor so ridiculous if they want it.“ Hume, ”Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,“ The Philosophical Works, ed. Green and Grose, 3:480, n.l. I have not been able to fmd any evidence that Hume knew Condorcet. His essay was written before the latter had become known through published works. Hume may have met the Marquis when he was in contact with Turgot in the 1760s.
See Popkin, “Condorcet and Hume and Turgot.” I could not find any evidence that they ever met when Hume was in Paris. Condorcet wrote an important life of Turgot and had access to Turgot’s papers. Somehow Hume is not mentioned in Condorcet’s biography, although Hume and Turgot were very close at one point.
See Popkin, “Condorcet, Abolitionist,” and “Condorcet’s Epistemology and His Politics.”
Several of these are discussed in Condorcet Studies,vol. 1, ed. Rosenfield, and Condorcet Studies,vol. 2, ed. Williams.
Cf. Popkin, “Schlick and Skepticism,” in Richard H. Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Leiden, 1992 ), 254–67.
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Popkin, R.H. (1998). Brissot and Condorcet: Skeptical Philosophers. In: van der Zande, J., Popkin, R.H. (eds) The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 155. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3465-3_3
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