Arnauld, Antoine (1612–1694)

Summary

Born in Paris, Antoine Arnauld was often called “the Great Arnauld,” both to distinguish him from his father and because of his considerable intellectual abilities. He was a leader of the Port Royal circle and an eminent representative of classical Augustinianism. His extensive body of work covers primarily theological questions debated in connection with the controversies surrounding Jansen's Augustinus. But he did devote some of his intellectual activity to philosophy, for the most part focusing quite closely on the thought of René Descartes.

Aside from his two co-written books (the Grammar, 1660, with Claude Lancelot; and the Logic, also called The Port Royal Logic, 1662, with Pierre Nicole) and the New Elements of Geometry (1667), Arnauld's strictly philosophical work is concentrated at the start and close of his career. At the beginning, in 1641, he wrote a set of philosophical theses and, more importantly, the Fourth Objections to Descartes’ Meditations, followed by an exchange of letters with Descartes in 1648. But it is at the other end of his intellectual journey, in his last few years, that Arnauld wrote the bulk of his philosophical texts. Best known among his works from that period are his correspondence with Leibniz about the Discourse on Metaphysics (beginning in 1686) and the voluminous books written between 1683 and 1694 during his controversy with Malebranche. To these well-known works should be added a series of texts on truth, ideas, and human freedom written between 1680 and 1690.

The Fourth Objections were, for the young Arnauld, a sort of philosophical initiation, since Descartes himself let it be known that he considered them “the best of all [those that had been raised] because he [Arnauld] penetrated further than any of the others in what [he] had written” (AT III 331, CSMK 175). This set of objections shows Arnauld's keen interest in Descartes’ philosophy, an interest that never faded, even if the degree of Arnauld's adherence to Cartesian thought has been and continues to be debated.