Radical Attitudes towards the Religions of Siam in Early Eighteenth-Century French Thought

As a consequence of the growing amount of information about the manners and customs of Siam, between the end of the seventeenth and the beginnings of the eighteenth century, a philosophical debate developed, mainly concerning religion. The essay focuses on three cases, that is the reference to Siamese religion in Bayle’s writings, the comparative approach in the Cerémonies religieuses by Bernard and Picart, and the deistic interpretation of Siamese religion in d’Argens work. These examples are proposed in order to show the variety of the heterodox attitudes towards non-Christian religions as evidence to demonstrate the difficulties of considering a “radical” philosophic perspective as a uniform and consistent framework.