Dingel, Irene
Senior Fellow: April–August 2020
Research Project: Truth and Scepticism. Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique in the Tension between Confessional Commitment and Early Enlightenment Scepticism
The French philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) is considered one of the great pioneers of the Enlightenment in Europe. His main work, the four-volume Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696/97), experienced an unexpectedly wide distribution. It laid the basis for Bayle’s reputation as a great sceptic and atheist, whose positions revealed an ambivalent attitude towards Christianity. He himself seemed – in view of the Huguenot persecution in France under Louis XIV – to oscillate between a faith rooted in the Calvinist tradition and doubting rationalism. This ambiguity is reflected in Bayle’s Dictionnaire, whose articles covertly suggest that readers should open up those areas that were previously comprehended only by faith and confession to the “light of reason.” The aim of this research project is to shed light on this paradigm shift that Bayle initiated, which appears in the abandonment of an understanding of reality that rests on religiously founded truth and leads to the development of a rationally grounded doubt. Bayle’s integration into the confessionality of his time will play a role in the project, as will the reception of his Dictionnaire in the German-speaking world, where the thought of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz mitigated Bayle’s critique.
Irene Dingel is the director of the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz (Department of European Religious History).