Early Modern French Thought: The Age of SuspicionOxford University Press, 2003 - 271 pages This book is an examination of three major French thinkers of the seventeenth century, Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche, of whom the latter two are comparatively little studied in the English-speaking world. It deals with a common attitude of suspicion towards everyday experience, which theysee as dominated and obscured by sensation, imagination, and the presence of the body. This attitude, however, obliges them to develop detailed and sophisticated accounts of the shaping of experience not only by the body but by interpersonal and social relationships, and of the tension between humannature as it is and as we experience it. The treatment of Descartes thus challenges the interpretation that sees him as eliminating the body from 'subjectivity', while that of Pascal and Malebranche shows how their critical attitude towards experience (a fertile source for twentieth-century Frenchthinkers) is linked with their religious doctrines, especially their Augustinian emphasis on Original Sin. |
Expressions et termes fréquents
affected Alquié amour-propre analysis animal spirits Aquinas argues Aristotelian Aristotle Arnauld Augustine Augustinian aware beliefs bodily body brain C. S. Lewis Cambridge Cartesian Cogito conception consciousness context critique Descartes Descartes's discourse discussed distinct early modern Éclaircissement Entretiens error ethical Étienne Gilson Euvres existence experience feel Fénelon Ferdinand Alquié Ferreyrolles French Gallimard Gouhier Henri Gouhier human nature images imagination individual intellectual involves Jansenism Jansenist Jansenius Jean-Luc Marion judgement kind knowledge l'âme l'homme la Pléiade Malebranche Meditation metaphysical métaphysique mind modifications Montaigne moral movement objects Œuvres one's OP III Original Sin ourselves pain Paris Pascal passions Pensées perceive perception philosophy physical pleasure Port-Royal Presses Universitaires purely qu'elle qu'il reason recherche relationship Rodis-Lewis sensation sense seventeenth-century simply Slavoj Žižek social soul substance term Théodore theology theory things thinking thought tion traces truth understanding Universitaires de France University Press vérité