Pierre Bayle

Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique was a bestseller throughout Europe for two centuries. Sally L. Jenkinson's masterly new edition presents the reader with a coherent path through Bayle's vast work, uncovering Bayle's progressive views on toleration and elitism. This anthology is the first in English to present Bayle as a specifically political thinker. Jenkinson's authoritative translation, careful selection of texts, and lucid introduction will be welcomed by scholars and students of the history of ideas, political theory, cultural history and French studies.

An enlightening history of deism, skepticism, and atheism from the 18th to 20th centuries.

This is the third edition of a classic book first published in 1960, which has sold thousands of copies in two paperback edition and has been translated into several foreign languages. Popkin's work has generated innumerable citations, and remains a valuable stimulus to current historical research. In this updated version, he has revised and expanded throughout, and has added three new chapters, one on Savonarola, one on Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, and one on Pascal. This authoritative treatment of the theme of scepticism and its historical impact will appeal to scholars and students of early modern history now as much as ever.

This work provides a philosophical framework within which the free speech clause of the Constitution's First Amendment may be understood. While much has been written on the First Amendment, this work is unique in offering an historically based thesis illuminating a point virtually ignored in the literature--the absolutist quality of the free speech clause and the philosophical dualism (words/deeds) on which it is based. Given the increasingly powerful forces favoring group rights in order to generate laws which would silence "offensive" speech, this book provides a radical challenge to the frameworks within which many such contemporary arguments are cast. It also reminds putative censors of the very special role free speech plays in any democratic community which aims to be self-governing.

This volume gathers together for the first time are all the key texts in a crucial debate in modern philosophy, centered on Leibniz's famous 1695 essay, the "New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication," in which he introduced his strikingly original theory of metaphysics. His "system" became increasingly famous and drew him into discussion and development of these ideas, both in public and in private, with a variety of thinkers, most notably the great French philosopher Pierre Bayle. Woolhouse's and Francks's new English edition gives the only full representation of this debate, and will therefore be essential reading for anyone who wishes to gain a proper understanding of Leibniz's philosophy and its intellectual context. All the texts are newly translated and extensively annotated; many appear in English for the first time.