Background
Antoine Arnauld was born on February 8, 1612 in Paris, France, and was the youngest of the 10 surviving children of Antoine Arnauld, a Parisian lawyer, and Catherine Marion de Druy.
"De la Fréquente communion" by Arnauld. First edition of “the work that established le Grand Arnauld’s reputation” (Rahir). “The book of ‘la fréquente communion’ was published in 1643 with the approvals of sixteen archbishops and bishops of France, and of twenty-four Sorbonne’s doctors. Since its publication, this work aroused very strong complaints. It was denounced in Rome.” (Diderot, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné, 1753, III, pp. 733-737).
Antoine Arnauld, known as Grand Arnauld, by Philippe de Champaigne. An oil painting in the National Museum of the Palace of Versailles.
Antoine Arnauld (engraving by Louis Simonneau after Philippe de Champaigne).
A statue of Antoine Arnauld on the facade of Paris City Hall.
Medal representing Antoine Arnauld, from the Metallic Gallery of Famous French Men, 1817.
Antoine Arnauld, French lawyer, philosopher, and Jansenist theologian.
Antoine Arnauld (6 February 1612 – 8 August 1694) was a French Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and mathematician.
Antoine Arnauld, priest, doctor of theology at the Sorbonne (1602-1694).
Bust of French theologian Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694). The 17th century sculpture on white marble.
Histoire abregée de la vie et des ouvrages de Monsr. Arnauld, 1695.
Antoine Arnauld, priest, doctor of theology at the Sorbonne (1602-1694).
Antoine Arnauld, priest, doctor of theology at the Sorbonne (1602-1694).
"De la Fréquente communion" by Arnauld. First edition of “the work that established le Grand Arnauld’s reputation” (Rahir). “The book of ‘la fréquente communion’ was published in 1643 with the approvals of sixteen archbishops and bishops of France, and of twenty-four Sorbonne’s doctors. Since its publication, this work aroused very strong complaints. It was denounced in Rome.” (Diderot, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné, 1753, III, pp. 733-737).
An original medal struck in bronze and made in Geneva by Jean Dassier in 1723 representing a portrait of Antoine Arnauld. From Dassier's series of Celebrated Men from the Time of Louis XIV.
The young Antoine attended the Collège de Calvi-Sorbonne in Paris.
the Collège de Lisieux, Paris, France
He studied theology at the Sorbonne University and, in 1641, was ordained into the Roman Catholic priesthood.
(Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and t...)
Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and theologians associated with Port-Royal Abbey, a center of the Catholic Jansenist movement in seventeenth-century France. Their enormously influential Logic or the Art of Thinking, which went through five editions in their lifetimes, treats topics in logic, language, theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and also articulates the response of "heretical" Jansenist Catholicism to orthodox Catholic and Protestant views on grace, free will and the sacraments.
https://www.amazon.com/Arnauld-Nicole-Thinking-Cambridge-Philosophy/dp/0521483948/?tag=2022091-20
(In this critical edition, Leibniz submits his metaphysics...)
In this critical edition, Leibniz submits his metaphysics of substance and form, concomitance and expression, freedom and necessity to the searching Socratic interrogation of Arnauld In this critical edition, Stephen Voss establishes the text of the magnificent Socratic correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Antoine Arnauld, provides an accurate English translation of the French text, and includes full apparatus helpful to student and scholar alike. The philosopher, physicist, and mathematician Leibniz presents the philosopher and theologian Arnauld with a unique new metaphysics and hones his ongoing thinking on the critical responses he receives.
https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Arnauld-Correspondence-Selections-Landgrave-Hessen-Rheinfels/dp/0300206534/?tag=2022091-20
linguist mathematician philosopher theologian
Antoine Arnauld was born on February 8, 1612 in Paris, France, and was the youngest of the 10 surviving children of Antoine Arnauld, a Parisian lawyer, and Catherine Marion de Druy.
The young Antoine attended the Collège de Calvi-Sorbonne, where one of his fellow students was his nephew, Isaac Lemaître de Sacy. Arnauld went on to study philosophy at the Collège de Lisieux, and then decided to follow in his father’s steps as a lawyer. However, under the influence of his mother and her confessor, Jean Duvergier, the abbé de Saint-Cyran he changed his mind and began studies in theology in 1633. Arnauld was ordained a priest and received the doctorate in theology in 1641, and entered the Sorbonne in 1643, after the death of Richelieu.
About 1640, Arnauld joined a small group of solitaires who lived in the countryside near Port-Royal and were associated with the convent. They included Pierre Nicole, Claude Launcelot, and Sacy. The solitaires initiated the petites écoles de Port-Royal which continued in various locations from the late 1630s until 1660. Their students included the dramatist Jean Racine. Later on, Arnauld cooperated with Sacy in the first important French translation of the Bible. He also co-authored the Grammaire générale et raisonnée with Lancelot and La Logique ou l’Art de penser (hereinafter Logic), with Nicole. All of these collaborative projects had their origins in the petites écoles. Blaise Pascal was closely associated with the solitaires beginning in 1655.
The year 1641 was an eventful one for Arnauld. He was ordained a priest on September 21. During the year, he completed the “Fourth Objections” to Descartes’ Meditations and wrote De la Fréquente communion (published in 1643). The first work established his reputation as a philosopher. The second went through many editions and had an effect on Catholic sacramental practice up to the end of the nineteenth century. Jansen’s Augustinus was also published in Paris in 1641, having been published posthumously in the Netherlands a year earlier. It was attacked by the official theologian of Paris, Isaac Habert, who preached a series of sermons against Jansen in the cathedral of Paris during Lent, 1643. Arnauld, who had arrived at an interpretation of Augustine similar to, though not identical with, that of Jansen, undertook, at the request of Saint-Cyran, to defend Jansen against the accusation of heresy. This he did in his Première Apologie pour Jansénius, 1644, and Seconde Apologie, 1645. Although Arnauld did not agree with important details of Jansen’s view, he continued to defend Jansen against the charge of heresy off and on for the rest of his life.
In 1653 the famous five propositions attributed to Jansen were declared to be heretical by Pope Innocent X in the Constitution “Cum Occasione.” Arnauld and most of the Port-Royal group claimed that the five propositions, although heretical on their most likely interpretation, were not in fact in Jansen’s work. The dispute led to Arnauld’s expulsion from the Sorbonne after a celebrated trial, which lasted from December 1, 1655 to January 30, 1656. Pascal came to Arnauld’s defense with the Provincial Letters, published in installments from January 23, 1656 to May, 1657.
The dispute lasted until 1669, when the French bishops who supported Arnauld worked out a compromise with Pope Clement IX, and Arnauld enjoyed almost a decade in the good graces of both the court and the Pope. During this time, Arnauld wrote voluminously on the Eucharist, but he also found time to co-author the Port-Royal Grammar and Logic, and to write his Nouveaux éléments de géométrie. However, in the late 1670s, the attacks on Port-Royal by civil and religious authorities resumed, and in 1679 Arnauld fled to the Netherlands, where he remained until his death, in Liège, on August 8, 1694.
The last fifteen years of Arnauld’s life, spent in self-imposed exile, were among his most fruitful in philosophy. During this period, he carried on his debates with Malebranche and Leibniz, and also reexamined his position on human free will. Arnauld’s published criticism of Malebranche began in 1683 with On True and False Ideas (hereinafter Ideas). But the central topic of the exchange was Malebranche’s use of occasionalism to explain how it is that not all human beings are saved. Arnauld provided a systematic criticism of that position in the three volumes of Réflexions philosophiques et théologiques sur le nouveau système de la nature et de la grâce (hereinafter Réflexions), published in 1685 and 1686. Arnauld’s famous correspondence with Leibniz was initiated by Leibniz in 1686, when he sent Arnauld the section headings of his projected Discourse on Metaphysics.
(In this critical edition, Leibniz submits his metaphysics...)
(Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and t...)
(Translation of Grammaire gaenaerale et raisonnaee.)
In his religious affiliation Arnauld was a Roman Catholic greatly influenced by Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, who was a French Catholic priest and the one who introduced Jansenism into France.
Although in many of his nontheological writings Arnauld is identified with the Port-Royal school, his voluminous correspondence—with Descartes and Leibniz, among others—bears witness to his own influence and acumen. His philosophical contributions are to be found in his objections to Descartes’s Méditations, in his dispute with Malebranche, and in the Port-Royal Logic, which he wrote with Pierre Nicole. The latter, a text developed from Descartes’s Regidae, elaborates the theory of “clear and distinct” ideas and gives the first account of Pascal’s Méthode. It had an enormous influence as a textbook until comparatively recent times.
The profound influence of the Regulae is shown in both the Logic and the Port-Royal Grammar, where it is assumed that linguistic and mental processes are virtually identical, that language is thus to be studied in its “inner” and “outer” aspects. This point of view underlies the project for a universal grammar and the notion of the “transparency” of language: mental processes are common to all human beings, although there are many languages. The Grammar and the Logic are based on a common analysis of signs that has brought the Port-Royal school to the attention of modern linguistic theorists, who see in it an anticipation of their own point of view.
The Èlèmens (1667) undertakes a reworking and reordering of the Euclidean theorems in the light of the contemporary literature (in which he was widely read) and Pascal’s influence. It bases its claim to originality and influence on the new order in which the theorems, many of them adapted from contemporary sources, are arranged. As mathematics, it is characterized by the mastery of the contemporary literature and by its clear and fresh exposition; its virtues are pedagogical. It is interesting to compare Arnauld’s order of theorems with such recent ones as that of Hilbert and Forder, whose aims are quite different. If Amauld’s pedagogical concerns are insufficiently appreciated, it may be because the role of what are properly pedagogical concerns in the habits and “methods” of modern science is insufficiently understood: its preoccupation with clarity and procedure, with formal exercises and notation, and the use of these as instruments of research.
Quotations:
"Rest, rest, shall I have not all eternity to rest."
"Common sense is not really so common."
"Thus Pyrrhonism is not a sect of people who are persuaded of what they say, but it is a sect of liars."
In his memoirs, Arnauld describes himself as a gentle man who could not win the affection of his father, who had high hopes placed upon another of his sons.
Quotes from others about the person
Ronald Knox says, “It was the fashion among the Jansenists to represent Antoine Arnauld as a great theologian; he should be remembered, rather as a great controversialist… A theologian by trade, Arnauld was a barrister by instinct” (Knox 1950, 196).