BUFFIER, Claude. - Jesuit, born in Warsaw to French parents on 25 May 1661, died in Paris on 17 May 1737. Having moved in his early years to Normandy, he attended the Jesuit college in Rouen; he entered their Order on 9 September 1679 and spent the rest of his life teaching literature at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris and theology in Rouen, except for a brief exile caused by a conflict with the archbishop of that city.
A skilled and lucid writer, in addition to a twenty-year collaboration (1701–21) with the *Mémoires de Trévoux*, he left about fifty works on ascetic, historical, philosophical, literary, and artistic subjects. The one that made him most famous was the *Traité des premières vérités et de la source des jugements* (Paris 1724), summarized in *Éléments de métaphysique à la portée de tout le monde* (ibid. 1725). Clear and undeniable is BUFFIER’s dependence on the epistemological theories of Descartes and Locke; yet equally clear—and even more so—is his refutation of their doctrines with keen and witty critical sense (*G. E. Brehier, Histoire de la philosophie*, II, 4th ed., Paris 1947, pp. 331–34). He exerted great influence on the philosophical theories of T. Reid, G. Beattie, and the entire Scottish school of philosophy, to the point of bordering on plagiarism. Also noteworthy is his *Cours de sciences sur des principes nouveaux et simples pour former le langage, l’esprit et le cœur dans l’usage ordinaire de la vie* (ibid. 1732), which includes a French grammar already printed in Paris as early as 1709 and which later grammarians widely and fruitfully drew upon.