BUFFIER, CLAUDE. — Jesuit, born in Warsaw to French parents on 25 May 1661, died in Paris on 17 May 1737. He was taken to Normandy in his early years and attended the Jesuit college at Rouen; he entered their Order on 9 September 1679 and spent his entire life teaching the humanities at the Collège de Louis le Grand in Paris and theology at Rouen, apart from a brief exile occasioned by a conflict with the archbishop of that city.
A capable and lucid writer, in addition to contributing assiduously for twenty years (1701–21) to the Mémoires de Trévoux, he left about fifty works on ascetic, historical, philosophical, literary, and artistic subjects. The work that made him most famous was the Traité des premières vérités et de la source des jugements (Paris 1724), abridged in Éléments de métaphysique à la portée de tout le monde (there 1725). B.’s dependence on the epistemological theories of Descartes and Locke is clear and undeniable; but equally clear, and even more so, is his refutation of their doctrines, carried out with an acute and ingenious critical sense (G. E. Brehier, Histoire de la philosophie, II, 4th ed., Paris 1947, pp. 331–34). He exerted a major influence on the philosophical theories of T. Reid, G. Beattie, and the entire Scottish philosophical school, at times coming close to plagiarism. Also worthy of note is his Cours de sciences sur des principes nouveaux et simples pour former le langage, l'esprit et le coeur dans l'usage ordinaire de la vie (there 1732), which includes a French grammar, already printed in Paris as early as 1709, on which later grammarians drew extensively and fruitfully.