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Author: Lester G. Crocker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400867940
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
Because of its fragmentary, evolving, exploratory, and dialectical character, Diderot's thought has continuously resisted overall synthesis. In the ideas of "order" and "disorder," ideas important in all of eighteenth-century thought, Lester G. Crocker finds the key to an outline of a structure that leads to a genuine synthesis of Diderot's writings on philosophy, morality, politics, and aesthetics. The tensions in Diderot's thought, Professor Crocker shows, reflect his understanding of reality itself—paradoxically, an anarchic order, a dynamic universe governed by laws but always changing in a chaotic way. The book examines Diderot's approach to aesthetics as a human ordering response to the world, and his approach to morals and politics as practical ways of dealing with the problems of order and disorder in the context of life in society. In light of the concepts of order and disorder, the inextricable associations of all of these realms of thought in Diderot's work become clear, and a unity is perceived. Since the problem of order and disorder was fundamental to an age faced with the dissolution of the Christian view of cosmic order, this novel approach to Diderot's work suggests new ways of understanding the Enlightenment as a whole. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Lester G. Crocker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400867940
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199
Get Book
Book Description
Because of its fragmentary, evolving, exploratory, and dialectical character, Diderot's thought has continuously resisted overall synthesis. In the ideas of "order" and "disorder," ideas important in all of eighteenth-century thought, Lester G. Crocker finds the key to an outline of a structure that leads to a genuine synthesis of Diderot's writings on philosophy, morality, politics, and aesthetics. The tensions in Diderot's thought, Professor Crocker shows, reflect his understanding of reality itself—paradoxically, an anarchic order, a dynamic universe governed by laws but always changing in a chaotic way. The book examines Diderot's approach to aesthetics as a human ordering response to the world, and his approach to morals and politics as practical ways of dealing with the problems of order and disorder in the context of life in society. In light of the concepts of order and disorder, the inextricable associations of all of these realms of thought in Diderot's work become clear, and a unity is perceived. Since the problem of order and disorder was fundamental to an age faced with the dissolution of the Christian view of cosmic order, this novel approach to Diderot's work suggests new ways of understanding the Enlightenment as a whole. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Otis Fellows
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600039390
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004456155
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the significance of modern chaos theory as a new paradigm in literary studies and argues for the usefulness of borrowings from one discipline to another. Its thesis is that external reality is real and is not merely a social construct. On the other hand, this volume reflects the belief that literature, as a social and cultural construct, is not unrelated to that external reality. The authors represented here furthermore believe that learning to communicate across disciplinary divides is worth the risk of looking silly to purists and dogmatists. In applying a contemporary scientific grid to a by-gone era, the authors play out Steven Weinberg's exhortation to mind the clues to the past that cannot be obtained in any other way. It is of course necessary to get the science right, yet the essays in this collection do not seek to do science, but rather to suggest that science and literature often share common assumptions and realities. Thus there is no attempt to legitimize literary study through the adoption of a scientific approach. Interaction between the disciplines requires mutual respect and a willingness to investigate the broader implications of scientific research. Consequently, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the long eighteenth century whether the focus is on England (Locke, Milton, Radcliffe, Lewis), France (Crébillion, Diderot, Marivaux, Montesquieu) or Germany (Kant, Moritz, Goethe, Fr. Schlegel). Moreover, given its multiple thrust in employing mythological, philosophical, and scientific notions of chaos, this volume will appeal to historians and philosophers of the European Enlightenment as well as to literary historians. The volume ultimately aspires to promote communication across centuries and across disciplines.
Author: Diana Guiragossian
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600004589
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Author: Geoffrey Bremner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521250080
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
This study discovers a pattern to Diderot's thinking, a fundamental dualism attributable largely to the attitudes and assumptions of the time and giving a common structure to his ideas and writing. Geoffrey Bremner draws widely on Diderot's works in studying his ideas on perception and action, aesthetics, ethics and politics, as well as his plays and fiction. The subtlety of the textual analysis and the analogies Dr Bremner draws provide a convincing and illuminating argument for his interpretation. He supports this but emphasising the intellectual circumstances in which Diderot wrote and demonstrating his links to other eighteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. His study will therefore make a valuable contribution to the reassessment of the period that is currently underway, as well as to the central, elusive problem presented by Diderot's thought itself.
Author: John C. O'Neal
Publisher: University of Delaware
ISBN: 1611490251
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
In The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, John C. O'Neal draws largely on the etymological meaning of the word confusion as the action of mixing or blending in order to trace the development of this project which, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and recognized the need to embrace complexity. Eighteenth-century thinkers used the notion of confusion in a progressive way to reorganize social classes, literary forms, metaphysical substances, scientific methods, and cultural categories such as taste and gender. In this new work, O'Neal explores some of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment's theories of knowledge. Each of the chapters in this book attempts to address the questions raised by the eighteenth century's particular approach to confusion as a paradoxical reorganizing principle for the period's progressive agenda. Perhaps the most paradoxical thinker of his times, Diderot occupies a central place in this study of confusion. Other authors include Marivaux, CrZbillon, Voltaire, and Pinel, among others. Rousseau and Sade serve as counterexamples to this kind of enlightenment but ultimately do not so much oppose the period's poetics of confusion as they complement it. The final chapter on Sade combines contemporary discussions of politics, society, culture, philosophy, and science in an encyclopedic way that at once reflects the entire period's tendencies and establishes important differences between Sade's thinking and that of the mainstream philosophes. Ultimately, confusion serves, O'Neal argues, as an overarching positive notion for the Enlightenment and its progressive ideals.
Author: Cynthia Verba
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019938102X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
"Prompted by controversial views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a vigorous philosophical debate about the nature of music. Their dialogue was one of extraordinary depth and richness, and dealth with some of the most fundamental issues of the French Enlightenment. In the newly revised edition of 'Music and the French Enlightenment', Cynthia Verba updates this fascinating story with the prolific scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published." -- rear cover.
Author: Jennifer Vanderheyden
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820458427
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
In addition to his philosophical works and innovative novels, the eighteenth-century writer Denis Diderot is most often recognized as one of the major authors of the Encyclopédie. Described by scholars as a modern and provocative thinker and writer, Diderot inspired intellectual discussion with his theories of artistic mimesis, in which he placed special emphasis on what is not stated in words, but is conveyed through gestures and other non-verbal methods of communication. This book explores Diderot's representation of the body as a tableau vivant - a literary painting in which the narrator portrays his characters as if suspended in a state of oscillation between paralysis and movement. The Function of the Dream and the Body in Diderot's Works discusses how Diderot's depiction of the body poses problems of interpretation for the serious reader/spectator, who, as in Freudian dream analysis, must generate a narrative based on a visual painting of the body's silent speech.
Author: Louise Crowther
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1906540888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
Renowned as the chief challenger of traditional views of morality, man's freedom, and religion from 1650-1750, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) spread alarm and confusion throughout Europe through his writings. Theologians and rulers desperately sought to ban the spread of Spinozist ideas, and, in the post-Spinozist climate, eighteenth- century thinkers, often exasperated and perplexed, attempted to cope with the fallout from this intellectual explosion. The philosophical radicalism of Denis Diderot (1713-84), a French philosophe, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), a German philosopher, well exemplifies the post-Spinozist mentality that permeated eighteenth-century thinking. As they grapple with the loss of intellectual, moral, and theological certainties, Diderot and Lessing re-work post-Spinozist ideas and in many instances elucidate even more radical ideas than Spinoza himself had envisaged.
Author: Gregory Bringman
Publisher: Les OntOeuvres
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
Artifacts for Diderot's Elements of Physiology is a translation of Denis Diderot's rare 18th Century work, Éléments de physiologie, situating it in light of New Materialism and other current debates in continental philosophy. It takes one of many possible theoretical tours through this oeuvre of Diderot, as well as incorporates other supplementary artifacts, including translations of sections of the Latin of Albrecht von Haller on which Diderot's text is partially based.With its critical footnotes and supplementary material, Artifacts addresses old and new materialism in Diderot as a work of theory. Its introductory discussion of animal organs, technical evolution and Diderot's relation to Ernst Kapp, Georges Canguilhem, and Gilbert Simondon is a new, contemporary critical framing for Éléments. While the focus of the critical French editions has been on an inescapable determinism of Diderot (Mayer), a lay anthropology rooted in Diderot's atheist conclusion to Éléments (Quintili), and an extensive presentation of Diderot's sources (Terada), Artifacts emphasizes the importance of Part I of the work. In Beings, Diderot most convincingly stakes out a radical transformist philosophical position appropriate to many issues currently at the forefront of philosophical discourse, demonstrating once more the inexhaustible ways Diderot's work can be fruitfully applied after the age of Lumières.
