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Author: David Lay Williams Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 9780271045511 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
"In this sterling, deeply researched study, Williams explores how thinkers ranging from Hobbes to d'Holbach highlight various sets of ideas that Rousseau combated in developing his philosophical teaching. The account of Rousseau's predecessors who might be called Platonists is especially interesting, as is the account of those who qualify as materialists. Moreover, Williams provides a good overview of Rousseau's teaching, demonstrates a commendable grasp of the relevant secondary literature, and argues ably for the superiority of his own interpretations ... Clearly written and superbly organized, this book contributes much to Rousseau studies. An indispensable book for Rousseau scholars, this volume also will appeal to general readers and students at all levels."--C.E. Butterworth, CHOICE.
Author: David Lay Williams Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 9780271045511 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
"In this sterling, deeply researched study, Williams explores how thinkers ranging from Hobbes to d'Holbach highlight various sets of ideas that Rousseau combated in developing his philosophical teaching. The account of Rousseau's predecessors who might be called Platonists is especially interesting, as is the account of those who qualify as materialists. Moreover, Williams provides a good overview of Rousseau's teaching, demonstrates a commendable grasp of the relevant secondary literature, and argues ably for the superiority of his own interpretations ... Clearly written and superbly organized, this book contributes much to Rousseau studies. An indispensable book for Rousseau scholars, this volume also will appeal to general readers and students at all levels."--C.E. Butterworth, CHOICE.
Author: James Farr Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107057019 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 537
Book Description
Includes essays by prominent political theorists and philosophers that trace the evolution of the general will from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Author: Jane O'Grady Publisher: Knowledge in a Nutshell ISBN: 9781788283724 Category : Enlightenment Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
"...there is nothing elementary about O'Grady's primer. She pulls off the feat of writing a reliable and accessible introduction to modern philosophy that is also a meaningful contribution to the subject." - London Times Literary Supplement From Descartes' famous line 'I think therefore I am' to Kant's fascinating discussions of morality, the thinkers of the Enlightenment have helped to shape the modern world. Addressing such important subjects as the foundations of knowledge and the role of ethics, the theories of these philosophers continue to have great relevance to our lives. Ranging across Enlightenment thinking from Berkeley to Rousseau, Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell explains important ideas such as Locke's ideas of primary and secondary qualities, Kant's moral rationalism, and Hume's inductive reasoning. Filled with helpful diagrams and simple summaries of complex theories, this essential introduction brings the great ideas of the past to everyone.
Author: David Lay Williams Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107511607 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be 'the Newton of the moral world', as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read and debated in the 250 years since its publication. Rousseau's Social Contract: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining Rousseau's famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication in 1762.
Author: Charles L Griswold Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315436558 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are giants of eighteenth century thought. The heated controversy provoked by their competing visions of human nature and society still resonates today. Smith himself reviewed Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, and his perceptive remarks raise an intriguing question: what would a conversation between these two great thinkers look like? In this outstanding book Charles Griswold analyzes, compares and evaluates some of the key ways in which Rousseau and Smith address what could be termed "the question of the self". Both thinkers discuss what we are by nature (in particular, whether we are sociable or not), who we have become, whether we can know ourselves or each other, how best to articulate the human condition, what it would mean to be free, and whether there is anything that can be done to remedy our deeply imperfect condition. In the course of examining their rich and contrasting views, Griswold puts Rousseau and Smith in dialogue by imagining what they might say in reply to one another. Griswold’s wide-ranging exploration includes discussion of issues such as narcissism, self-falsification, sympathy, the scope of philosophy, and the relation between liberty, religion and civic order. A superb exploration of two major philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith: A Philosophical Encounter is essential reading for students and scholars of these two figures, eighteenth century philosophy, the Enlightenment, moral philosophy, and the history of ideas. It will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as political theory, economics, and religion.
Author: Michael Davis Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812251717 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
In recent years, the field of cognitive psychology has begun to explore the rootedness of rational thinking in subrational inspiration, insight, or instinct—a kind of prediscursive hunch that leaps ahead and guides rational thought before the reasoning human being is even aware of it. In The Music of Reason, Michael Davis shows that this "musical" quality of thinking is something that leading philosophers have long been aware of and explored with great depth and subtlety. Focusing on the work of three thinkers traditionally viewed as among the most poetic of philosophers—Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato—Davis reveals the complex and profound ways in which they each plumbed the depths of reason's "prerational" foundations. Davis first examines Rousseau's Essay on the Origins of Languages: Where Something Is Said About Melody and Musical Imitation and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music to demonstrate that revealing the truth, or achieving individual enlightenment, requires poetic techniques such as irony, indirection, and ambiguity. How philosophers say things is as worthy of our attention as what they say. Turning to Plato's Lesser Hippias, Davis then reconsiders the relation between truth-telling and lying, finding the Platonic dialogue to be an artful synthesis of music and reason. The "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" that Plato placed near the core of this thinking suggests a tension between the rational (scientific) and the nonrational (poetic), or between the true and the beautiful—the one clear and definite, the other allusive and musical. Contemplating language in Rousseau, the Dionysian in Nietzsche, and playfulness in Plato, The Music of Reason explores how what we might initially perceive as irrational and so antithetical to reason is, in fact, constitutive of it.
Author: Mark Kremer Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1498527485 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 129
Book Description
Romanticism and Civilization examines romantic alternatives to modern life in Rousseau’s foundational novel Julie. It argues that Julie is a response to the ills of modern civilization, and that Rousseau saw that the Enlightenment’s combination of science and of democracy degraded human life by making it bourgeois. The bourgeois is man uprooted by science and attached to nothing but himself. He lives a commercial life and his materialism and calculations penetrate all aspects of his existence. He is neither citizen, nor family man, nor lover in any serious sense: his life is meaningless. Rousseau’s romanticism in Julie is an attempt to find connectedness through the sentiments of private life and wholeness through love, marriage, and family.
Author: Nelson Lund Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319413902 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
This book reads Jean-Jacques Rousseau with a view toward deepening our understanding of many political issues alive today, including the place of women in society, the viability of traditional family structures, the role of religion and religious freedom in nations that are becoming ever more secular, and the proper conduct of American constitutional government. Rousseau has been among the most influential modern philosophers, and among the most misunderstood. The first great philosophic critic of the Enlightenment, he sought to revive political philosophy as it was practiced by Plato, and to make it useful in the modern world. His understanding of politics rests on deep and often prescient reflections about the nature of the human soul and the relationship between our animal origins and the achievements of civilization. This book demonstrates that the implications Rousseau drew from those reflections continue to deserve serious attention.
Author: Julia Simon Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 027106272X Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
Renowned for his influence as a political philosopher, a writer, and an autobiographer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is known also for his lifelong interest in music. He composed operas and other musical pieces, invented a system of numbered musical notation, engaged in public debates about music, and wrote at length about musical theory. Critical analysis of Rousseau’s work in music has been principally the domain of musicologists, rarely involving the work of scholars of political theory or literary studies. In Rousseau Among the Moderns, Julia Simon puts forth fresh interpretations of The Social Contract, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and the Confessions, as well as other texts. She links Rousseau’s understanding of key concepts in music, such as tuning, harmony, melody, and form, to the crucial problem of the individual’s relationship to the social order. The choice of music as the privileged aesthetic object enables Rousseau to gain insight into the role of the aesthetic realm in relation to the social and political body in ways often associated with later thinkers. Simon argues that much of Rousseau’s “modernism” resides in the unique role that he assigns to music in forging communal relations.
Author: Anthony Gottlieb Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 163149208X Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
One of Slate’s 10 Best Books of the Year Anthony Gottlieb’s landmark The Dream of Reason and its sequel challenge Bertrand Russell’s classic as the definitive history of Western philosophy. Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb documented the first burst, which came in the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Now, in his sequel, The Dream of Enlightenment, Gottlieb expertly navigates a second great explosion of thought, taking us to northern Europe in the wake of its wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. In a relatively short period—from the early 1640s to the eve of the French Revolution—Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all made their mark. The Dream of Enlightenment tells their story and that of the birth of modern philosophy. As Gottlieb explains, all these men were amateurs: none had much to do with any university. They tried to fathom the implications of the new science and of religious upheaval, which led them to question traditional teachings and attitudes. What does the advance of science entail for our understanding of ourselves and for our ideas of God? How should a government deal with religious diversity—and what, actually, is government for? Such questions remain our questions, which is why Descartes, Hobbes, and the others are still pondered today. Yet it is because we still want to hear them that we can easily get these philosophers wrong. It is tempting to think they speak our language and live in our world; but to understand them properly, we must step back into their shoes. Gottlieb puts readers in the minds of these frequently misinterpreted figures, elucidating the history of their times and the development of scientific ideas while engagingly explaining their arguments and assessing their legacy in lively prose. With chapters focusing on Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, and Voltaire—and many walk-on parts—The Dream of Enlightenment creates a sweeping account of what the Enlightenment amounted to, and why we are still in its debt.
Author: David Lay Williams
Author: David Lay Williams
Author: James Farr
Author: Jane O'Grady
Author: David Lay Williams
Author: Charles L Griswold
Author: Michael Davis
Author: Mark Kremer
Author: Nelson Lund
Author: Julia Simon
Author: Anthony Gottlieb