Pierre Bayle

Pierre Bayle
Pierre Bayle
Born	18 November 1647 Carla-le-Comte, Kingdom of France
Died	28 December 1706 Rotterdam, Dutch Republic
Era	17th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
Notable ideas	Bayle's skeptical trilemma
Influences Descartes, Spinoza
Influenced Condorcet, Diderot, Frederick the Great, Hume, des Maizeaux, Mandeville, Maupertuis, Toland, Vico, Voltaire

Pierre Bayle (French: [bɛl]; 18 November 1647 – 28 December 1706) was a French philosopher and writer best known for his seminal work the Historical and Critical Dictionary, published beginning in 1697.

Bayle was a Protestant. As a forerunner of the Encyclopedists and an advocate of the principle of the toleration of divergent beliefs, his works subsequently influenced the development of the Enlightenment.

Bayle was born at Carla-le-Comte (later renamed Carla-Bayle in his honour), near Pamiers, Ariège, France. He was educated by his father, a Calvinist minister, and at an academy at Puylaurens. He afterwards entered a Jesuit college at Toulouse, and became a Roman Catholic a month later (1669). After seventeen months, he returned to Calvinism and fled to Geneva.

There he became acquainted with the teachings of René Descartes. He returned to France and went to Paris, where for some years he worked under the name of Bèle as a tutor for various families. In 1675 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Protestant Academy of Sedan. In 1681 the university at Sedan was suppressed by the government in action against Protestants.

Just before that event, Bayle had fled to the Dutch Republic, where he almost immediately was appointed professor of philosophy and history at the École Illustre in Rotterdam. He taught for many years, but became embroiled in a long internal quarrel in the college. It resulted in Bayle being deprived of his chair in 1693.