Pierre Bayle

Pierre Bayle (1647 to 1706), called the Philosopher of Rotterdam, was a French Protestant refugee who worked as a historian, literary critic, journalist, encyclopedist and professor, and above all as a philosopher. Born into a Huguenot family in the south of France, he lost his academic post when Louis XIV closed the Protestant academies and fled to Rotterdam. His six-million-word Historical and Critical Dictionary became a bestseller of its age and was called the Arsenal of the Enlightenment. Its remarks press objections to Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, defend ancient skepticism, ground religious toleration in metaphysics, argue that an atheist can be virtuous and refute every known answer to the problem of evil. Leibniz wrote his Theodicy largely in answer to him.