安托万·阿尔诺

作品

• 1662逻辑，或思维的艺术（波尔-罗亚尔逻辑）

  与皮埃尔·尼科尔为波尔-罗亚尔学校合著：一部笛卡尔式的逻辑学，讲观念、判断、推理与方法，区分一个普遍观念的内涵与外延，直到十九世纪仍是标准教科书。

• 1683论真观念与假观念

  针对马勒伯朗士：观念不是我们在上帝之中看见的表象性存在，而是知觉本身，是我们自己心灵的一种样态，直接以其对象为对象。

立场

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).

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• 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)