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The Genevan printer and bookseller Jean-Louis Dufour (1656-89) had a brief career, interrupted abruptly by a bankruptcy. He succeeded nevertheless during the first three years of his activity in finding his place in the world of the Geneva book trade. By adopting an original policy in the management of his activity, Dufour published various Latin translations, which at the time was the lingua franca of scholars and intellectuals in Europe. Among these translations we find the famous masterpiece of Nicolas Malebranche, De la Recherche de la vérité. The present study explores the history of this printer, his business strategies and his intellectual preferences through two main documents: a book sale catalogue of 1683 and the inventory of vacant goods established after his bankruptcy. In addition, this study devotes special attention to Dufour’s translation of De la Recherche de la vérité to show how this initiative contributed to the spread of Malebranche’s philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how The Fable of the Bees was received in France, and provides a broad outline of its influence on the philosophers of the French Enlightenment. Reference to Bernard Mandeville's work in French periodicals (between 1720 and 1750), together with a series of disapproving critiques that appeared after the French translation of the Fable, indicate keen interest in this author on the part of French intellectuals. Mandeville's reputation both on the Continent and in England as an immoral philosopher and champion of paradoxical theses, had earned him a degree of fame in France even before the publication of the French translation of the Fable in 1740. Even if considerably closer to the original than the unpublished translation by Emilie Du Châtelet, this translation reveals a number of discrepancies with respect to Mandeville's text, which -- along with the accompanying Introduction -- suggest an attempt by the editors to adjust the philosophy and to tone down the shocking ramifications of some of the author's theses. Despite the numerous adverse critiques prompted by the book, the Fable had a strong influence on several French authors, such as Voltaire and Jean-Francois Melon. In particular, Mandeville's reflections on luxury and economics had a major impact on French philosophers, fuelling a heated dispute over luxury, and pointing to the centrality of economic analysis in the study of human society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the Cartesian plan to construct a universal system of science based on certain knowledge, the Oratorian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) attempts to found a "science" of ethics which could serve to liberate practical knowledge from the restrictions of uncertainty and relativity in which it was confined. In applying to ethics the criteria established by Cartesian epistemology, the author highlights the necessity to study the stable and immutable principles of morality, from which could emerge, through rational arguments, a whole system of moral values. This project, first announced in the Search after Truth is developed in the Treatise on Ethics, in which Malebranche's vision comes to life as an original theory. His strictly rationalist and intellectualist approach -- focusing on the challenge of rational knowledge of moral truths -- converges with a Christian and the ocentric conception, true to the strong apologetic requirements that direct the author's thinking. In this text, using the form of philosophical reasoning, Malebranche proposes and demonstrates as certain the principles of religion ultimately achieving a philosophical definition of Christian virtue and its rational justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]