Antoine Arnauld

Dzieła

• 1662Logika, czyli sztuka myślenia (Logika z Port-Royal)

  Napisana z Pierre’em Nicole’em dla szkół Port-Royal: kartezjańska logika idei, sądów, rozumowania i metody, która odróżnia treść idei ogólnej od jej zakresu i pozostała standardowym podręcznikiem aż do XIX wieku.

• 1683O prawdziwych i fałszywych ideach

  Przeciw Malebranche’owi: idea nie jest bytem przedstawiającym, który widzimy w Bogu, lecz samą percepcją, modyfikacją własnego umysłu, która bezpośrednio dotyczy swojego przedmiotu.

Stanowisko

Arnauld combined Augustine’s theology with Descartes’ philosophy. His Fourth Objections, which Descartes valued highly, raised among other points two problems that are still discussed: Descartes had shown only that he could doubt the existence of his body, not that mind and body are really distinct; and if clear and distinct perception is guaranteed by God’s existence, while God’s existence is known by clear and distinct perception, the argument seems to move in a circle – the “Cartesian circle”. He also asked how Descartes’ account of matter could be reconciled with the doctrine of the Eucharist. The Port-Royal Logic turns Cartesian method into a theory of thinking in four parts – conceiving, judging, reasoning and ordering – and distinguishes the comprehension of a general idea, the attributes it contains, from its extension, the things to which it applies. Against Malebranche he held that ideas are not representative entities that we see in God but our perceptions themselves, which are directly of their objects; historians of philosophy still debate how far this amounts to a direct realism. In his letters to Leibniz he objected that the notion of a complete individual concept, which contains everything that will ever happen to a person, seemed to make all events necessary. The Port-Royal Grammar treats language as the expression of thought; Noam Chomsky took it up in Cartesian Linguistics (1966).

Życie i kontekst

Antoine Arnauld was born in Paris on 6 February 1612, the youngest of the twenty children of the lawyer Antoine Arnauld. Much of his family was bound up with the Cistercian abbey of Port-Royal: his sister Angélique was its reforming abbess, and his mother, several sisters and nieces became nuns there. He studied theology at the Sorbonne, came under the influence of the abbé de Saint-Cyran, and became a priest and doctor of theology in 1641. In the same year Mersenne passed him Descartes’ Meditations, to which he wrote the Fourth Objections. His book On Frequent Communion (1643) and his defence of Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus made him the leading theologian of the Jansenists. After his Second Letter to a Duke and Peer the faculty of theology censured him and in February 1656 excluded him; Pascal wrote the Provincial Letters in his defence. At Port-Royal he wrote the General and Rational Grammar (1660) with Claude Lancelot and the Logic, or the Art of Thinking (1662) with Pierre Nicole. After the “Peace of the Church” of 1669 he could appear in public again, but in 1679 renewed pressure drove him into exile in the Spanish Netherlands. There he wrote against Malebranche, beginning with On True and False Ideas (1683), and corresponded with Leibniz (1686–1690). He died in Brussels on 8 August 1694.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Fourth Objections to Descartes’ Meditations (1641)
• On Frequent Communion (De la fréquente communion, 1643)
• General and Rational Grammar (Grammaire générale et raisonnée, with Claude Lancelot, 1660)
• Logic, or the Art of Thinking (with Pierre Nicole, 1662)
• On True and False Ideas (Des vraies et des fausses idées, 1683)
• Correspondence with Leibniz (1686–1690)