Claude Buffier

Claude Buffier (born May 25, 1661, Warsaw, Pol.—died May 17, 1737, Paris, France) was a French philosopher, historian, philologist, and educator, considered by the anticlerical Voltaire to be “the only Jesuit who has given a reasonable system of philosophy.”

Buffier taught philosophy and theology at Rouen and literature at the college of the Jesuits in Paris, where he spent most of his life. In 1696 he was exiled for five years because of opposition to his archbishop’s support of Jansenism, a movement within Roman Catholicism that stressed predestination and denied free will. In his best-known work, Traité des vérités premières et de la source de nos jugements (1724; “Treatise on First Truths and on the Source of Our Judgments”), Buffier sought to discover the ultimate principle of human knowledge. Beginning with the sense of the self’s existence, he adopted the approach taken by Descartes, though he rejected the Cartesian method of a priori, or deductive, reasoning. Instead, he relied on common sense, a faculty that allows different men to reach similar conclusions. Thus, he was able to affirm the Cartesian conclusion that objects external to the human mind do indeed have their own separate existences.

Buffier’s influence extended to 19th-century French philosophy by way of the Scottish school of common sense, notably Thomas Reid. Buffier also wrote Éléments de métaphysique (1725), a widely used French grammar (1709), Cours de sciences (1732), and numerous essays in history, religion, and education.

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