Political views Bernard lived during the turbulent times when the
Knights Hospitallers were ousted from the
Maltese islands by
Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. Despite the fact that the French, in turn, were overthrown by the
Maltese, and later driven out in 1800 by the British, the
Knights Hospitallers were not reinstated. Bernard lived his last years during the ‘temporary’ rule of the British. These developments must not have been to Bernard’s liking. He was very proud of his
Christian faith and also very fond of the
Knights Hospitallers. To see them reduced to a nonentity must have been difficult for him to acknowledge.
Philosophy In terms of his philosophical positions, Bernard must be considered to be a modern philosopher. He wrote in the pre-Kantian period of modern philosophy when two main schools of thought, namely
rationalism and
empiricism, opposed each other despite their common inheritance of the characteristic Cartesian prejudice of the whole of modern philosophy – viz. that what man knows directly and immediately are not things themselves but his own ‘ideas’. Bernard was not a rationalist in the sense that he adopts the ‘geometrical method’ which characterised the writings of
Descartes,
Spinoza and
Leibniz. Nor is Bernard a rationalist in the sense of excluding supernatural faith. While
Descartes in the
Discourse on Method attempts to construct knowledge entirely on reason and not on dogma or faith, Bernard takes the
existence of God for granted and accepts the immortality of the soul on the basis of faith. Bernard can be labelled a rationalist only in a very wide sense; only in so far as he highly values the rational qualities of man (bequeathed upon him by God). His emphasis on man as a
rational animal, and his discourse in the preface to his
Trattato concerning the spirit of his attempt to illumine the minds of men, are grounds for considering his work to be part and parcel of the enlightenment culture of the 18th century. In any stricter (epistemological) sense of the word ‘rationalist’, Bernard should rather be considered as adhering to the opposite camp. He takes sensorial
experience as the point of departure for the acquisition of knowledge. He criticises the theory of innate ideas – characteristic of the rationalist stream of thought in
modern philosophy – and points out that the mind is at birth a
tabula rasa or rather a blank slate awaiting ideas from experience. He thinks that ideas are derived from experience, and this is highly reminiscent of the empiricism of
Locke. However, he does seem to have the greatest sympathy for
Malebranche (who belongs, in the epistemological sense of the word, to the rationalist school) out of all philosophers, except on this basic issue of the origin of ‘ideas’. There is hardly any indication whatsoever of indebtedness to
Thomistic philosophy in Bernard’s work despite his repeated professions of deference to the
Catholic Church. His tacit rejection, rather than explicit opposition, to the central features of the anthropology of
Aquinas, notably its anti-dualism, is, however, not surprising and possibly unintended.
Appreciation In academic circles, Bernard is revered more as a philosopher than as a medical doctor. This might be because his major writing, even if written in his youth, is more of a philosophical nature than anything else. It might be also due to the fact that Bernard is generally eclipsed by his more well-known contemporary,
Joseph Demarco. In any case, since 1995, when Bernard’s
Trattato was presented to the public as a work worthy of philosophical consideration, more and more attention was given to the work by philosophers. Unfortunately, Claude Falzon's excellent translation of it, made in 1998, is still to be published. Falzon’s work also includes a philosophical study of Bernard’s book as an introduction. Nevertheless, further investigations would certainly be more than fitting, especially to amplify the biographical data concerning Bernard’s life, times and also his professional and academic activities. ==Further reading==