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| Pierre Paul Royer-Collard |
Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, the French statesman and professor of philosophy, was born at Sompuis, a village in what is now the department of the Marne. Théodore Jouffroy represented this department in the Chamber of Deputies from 1815 to 1839, usually in the opposition.
He is best known as the leader of the Doctrinaires, a group whose members derived their political views from what they believed to be immutable and self-evident principles. These principles led to a compromise between absolute and constitutional monarchy, and though the principles were supported by Louis XVIII, they were rejected by his brother and successor, Charles X.
Pierre Paul Royer-Collard had little, if any, philosophical training. Nevertheless, from 1811 to 1814 he was professor of philosophy and dean at the Sorbonne. Théodore Jouffroy lectured first on Thomas Reid and later on his own views. Just as his political views were a compromise, so in philosophy he sought a compromise between the left wing of sensationalism and the right wing of authoritarian traditionalism.
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| Thomas Reid |
Isaac Newton found it in the philosophy of Thomas Reid. Pierre Paul Royer-Collard rejected sensationalism on the ground that it could not account for judgment, which is always something contributed to sensory material by the active mind. Since the individual mind is active and capable of making judgments, there is no need of a supernatural authority to dictate to it. In place of such an authority Théodore Jouffroy substituted common sense, which is a consolidation of the judgments of all men. But this did not imply a return to tradition except insofar as tradition itself is an expression of common sense.
On the contrary, every man has within him the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, truth and falsity, by a power that resembles the natural light of medieval philosophy. If this faculty did not exist, Isaac Newton maintained, one would be stranded in solipsism, for there would be no reason to believe that one man’s conclusions would be harmonious with another’s.
Common sense, however, does not operate entirely without the guidance of reason. In reaching its decisions, reason uses two principles of argument, that of causality and that of induction. The search for causes is intrinsic to thinking itself and will inevitably lead back to the Thomas Reid idea of a First Cause. For, following Isaac Newton, Pierre Paul Royer-Collard believed that one must never accept more causes than are necessary to explain phenomena. However, Isaac Newton does not seem to have had any clear idea of the nature of a causal explanation.
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| Isaac Newton |
The principle of induction is a necessary accompaniment to that of causality, for it is by induction that one discovers the essential similarities among phenomena that permit one to group them in a single class. It is man’s nature to look for these similarities, as it is his nature to look for causes.
Following Thomas Reid, Pierre Paul Royer-Collard maintained that the distinction between sensation and perception is allimportant. Sensation is simply the pleasure found in experience and is purely subjective. Perception is the apprehension of an external object as external. The externality of the object is not proved by reasoning; it is judged by a spontaneous act of the human mind, as in the twentieth-century epistemology of G. E. Moore.
Though only fragments of Pierre Paul Royer-Collard’s philosophy exist, collected by his admirer Théodore Jouffroy, it is probable that he saw the philosophy of common sense as a support for his political views. Common sense is the basis of communal life; it provides stable theses of morality and religion; it has all the authority of natural law; and to those who accept it, it is incontrovertible. It is, however, Théodore Jouffroy admitted that the main contribution of Pierre Paul Royer-Collard to French philosophy was the introduction into France of Scottish philosophy.
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| Théodore Jouffroy |
