French philosopher and writer (1647–1706)
A Huguenot refugee who published a dictionary so dangerous he buried his best arguments in the footnotes. Leibniz wrote a book to refute him, Voltaire called him the greatest dialectician who ever lived, and Jefferson put the English translation in the Library of Congress's founding collection.
Pierre Bayle was born 18 November 1647 in France, a Huguenot in a kingdom that would soon make that faith untenable. In 1681 he fled religious persecution for the Dutch Republic. From exile he began publishing his Historical and Critical Dictionary in 1697, a work that hid its most controversial ideas in sprawling footnotes or tucked them into articles on safe-seeming topics. His skeptical philosophy and his case for religious toleration fed directly into the Enlightenment—so much so that he's considered a forerunner of the Encyclopédistes a generation later. He died 28 December 1706, having s…
Sourced, dated quotes from Pierre Bayle
Reason is like a runner who doesn't know that the race is over, or, like Penelope, constantly undoing what it creates....
There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.
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