Claude Buffier, <i>Traité des premières vérités</i> . Édition, présentation et notes par L. Rouquayrol BuffierClaude, <i>Traité des premières vérités</i> . Édition, présentation et notes par RouquayrolL.. (Textes cartésiens.) Paris: Vrin, 2020. 379 pp.

‘Textes cartésiens’: that is the name of the series in which Louis Rouquayrol’s edition of Claude Buffier’s 1724 Traité des premières vérités was published. And indeed Descartes appears to be Buffier’s primary interlocutor in this as in many other texts. From the author of the Discours de la méthode Buffier inherits a rigid dualistic interpretation of reality, a fascination with rigorous arguments, and an inclination to doubt and question received ideas. Yet labelling Buffier as a mere Cartesian would be in many ways problematic. Buffier looks with concern at Descartes’s hyperbolic doubt, which he views as naturally leading to idealism and scepticism, and opposes to solipsism a soft form of empiricism, which he may inherit from either Locke or scholasticism: in his hands, Descartes’s cogito becomes ‘je pense, je sens, j’existe’ (p. 84). Of course, the ‘je sens’ nestled here in between the notions of thought and being is not in the first instance connected to empiricism: following an established tradition, Buffier identifies in the ‘sentiment intime qu’a chacun de nous de sa propre existence’ (p. 83) our fundamental source of knowledge about our own existence. As we move forward in the text, however, the ambiguity of Buffier’s ‘je sens’ becomes clearer. Taken in isolation, the sentiment intime is powerless against the deception of Descartes’s malicious demon. Something must reassure us as to the existence of the contingent world, of the res extra nos, not least because the existence of God, Buffier reasons in stark contrast to Descartes’s rationalism, is best demonstrated a posteriori. To overcome this problem, Buffier turns to the idea of ‘sentiment commun’ or ‘sens commun’, a faculty which he presents as having epistemological status at least equal to the sentiment intime, and which human beings would importantly (if perhaps slightly problematically) develop through experience. Buffier’s notion of ‘sens commun’ is interesting and ought to receive more scholarly attention. Thomas Reid’s debt to Buffier has already been the subject of some scholarly activity — suffice it to think of Louise Marcil-Lacoste’s Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982) — but much remains to be done to gauge the importance of the Traité in common-sense theory. A study of Paul Thiry d’Holbach’s attitudes towards Buffier, in particular, would arguably yield intriguing results, especially since Kathleen Sonia Wilkins has already drawn attention to the silent presence of Buffier’s texts in the Encyclopédie (A Study of the Works of Claude Buffier (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1969)). With its striking remarks about mind–body relations, its refusal to take the existence of God as a self-evident truth, and its ambivalence on the notions of immortality and moral freedom, the Traité will be of interest to scholars working on eighteenth-century materialism and radicalism, too. More broadly, Buffier’s attempts at combining Cartesianism and empiricism and at popularizing philosophy make the Traité worthwhile reading for anyone working to reconstruct the origins and development of Enlightenment culture. One cannot but be grateful to Rouquayrol for making this text available to the public, especially with such an informative Introduction and rich annotations.

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