Noël-Antoine Pluche as a Jansenist natural theologian

Abstract

Constance Blackwell introduced me to early modern histories of philosophy when I first met her some time around the 1993 publication of Giovanni Santinello's Models of the History of Philosophy vol.1. The notion of studying how early modern thinkers approached their own recent intellectual history was new to me and inspiring. Works like Morhof's Polyhistor and J.J. Brucker's Historia criticae philosophiae offer new perspectives on canonical figures (Bruno, Bacon, and Hobbes as ‘eclectics’ for example) and lesser-known ones (e.g. the Mosaic philosophers or the theosophs) and are also examples of the working tools (both physical books and mental categories) available to the learned at the time. Contemporary histories, along with other sources like book reviews, inventories of book ownership, and publication records, can highlight the significance in the past of intellectual positions that have not been much discussed in modern histories of thought, for example because they do not comfortably match the categories deployed there. The Spectacle de la nature of the abbé Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688-1761) offers one such case: although it was a huge publishing success in 18thcentury France and Europe (with translations into five other languages), it has attracted the attention of historians only recently. Its form of natural theological argument, though widely read at the time, has been overshadowed in historical accounts by the better-studied arguments from design rationally understood. Pluche emphasized instead the limits of human reason and argued for the greatness of God from the wonderful and unfathomable harmony of nature.