But above all he is concerned with getting directly to the source of Huet's objections, that is to Descartes' actual works and to the sets of Objections and Replies that followed Meditations, in which the replies to the problems that were to be raised by Huet are already frequently foreshadowed. Lennon carefully reconstructs the exchanges in the Huet-Regis polemic, as well as providing copious illustration of what we might call the side episodes, represented by the sceptical-academic production of Simon Foucher, and by the publication of Malebranche's much more innovative Recherche de la vérité. Regis au livre intitulé Censura philosophiae cartesianae ) that has never been published but is preserved in the Bibliothè que Nationale in Paris in a manuscript that is extremely difficult to read. Huet made a minute examination of Regis' book in a work ( La censure de la réponse faite par M. Regis published a Réponse au livre … Censura philosophiae cartesianae in 1691 and Huet took it into account for the new edition of Censura that appeared in 1694. It is known that Censura triggered a long-running polemic, with repeated revivals, between Huet and the Cartesian philosopher Pierre-Sylvain Regis. Not by chance are the last words of the book a true celebration of Descartes' "superiority": "The heroic, the defensible, the responsible Descartes" (p. But he is continually concerned to demonstrate how little these objections grasped the true substance of Descartes' theory, and to show that the theory already contained effective replies to many of the objections. Indeed, Lennon starts from Huet's criticism of Cartesian philosophy (first and foremost Censura philosophiae cartesianae of which he gave us an English translation with introduction and annotations ). Strictly speaking, we should say that the book concerns Descartes as much as Huet (as the subtitle says) and possibly the former more than the latter.
He has now gained a deserved place in the history of Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophy with this book by Thomas Lennon, which awards Huet a place that up to now, as a "minor" author, he had never enjoyed. Popkin's classic History of Scepticism (which went into its third and last edition in 2003 on Huet see Ch. Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721), Bishop of Avranches, earned an important place in the history of modern scepticism thanks to Richard H.
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