Bayle’s Absent Presences: Descartes and Other Guests in the Dictionnaire historique et critique

Abstract

This essay treats the question of missing entries in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique: why do some prominent names have no articles of their own although they do feature under different headings? After a brief analysis of the structure of the Dictionnaire, the categories of ‘hosts’, ‘servants’, and ‘guests’ are introduced to clarify the different roles played by names throughout the work. The paper then focuses on the case of the missing article ‘Descartes’, whose absence may be explained partly by Bayle’s personal relations with Descartes’s biographer Adrien Baillet, and perhaps also by Bayle’s increasing interest in Spinoza. This paper does not aim to solve the question of absences, but to argue that this question may lead to productive new ways of reading Bayle.