Criticism of Seventeenth-Century Metaphysical Systems: Descartes, Malebranche and Boursier

Abstract

The middle section of the Traité des systèmes, to which it owes its name, consists of more than half of the whole treatise and is devoted to criticisms of the systems of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Le Père Boursier and Spinoza. Like the examples of the blind man, the planets and the art of divination already discussed, they are intended to illustrate the abuses of the type of reasoning which leads to “erreurs,” “obscurités” and “équivoques,” and not, as Damiron thought, as a panorama of the history of philosophy.¹ Not only did these particular philosophers, in Condillac’s opinion, reason “à perte de vue” in the proverbial “ivory tower,” the walls of which effectively sealed them off from all contact with practical reality, on premises which could not be verified by fact, with ill-defined terms and ambiguous signs, but also these were the philosophers who were still very much the centre of wide-spread controversy.²