Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion: 60 (Cambridge Studies in French, Series Number 60) - Hardcover

Hayes, Julie Candler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052165128X ISBN 13: 9780521651288

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Synopsis

In this 1999 book, Julie Candler Hayes offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse. Taking issue both with traditional liberal and contemporary critical accounts of the Enlightenment, she analyses the writings of Denis Diderot, Emilie Du Châtelet, the Abbé de Condillac, Buffon, d'Alembert and numerous others, to argue for a new understanding of 'systematic reason' as complex, paradoxical and ultimately liberating. Hayes examines the tensions between freedom and constraint, abstraction and materialism, linear and synoptic order, that pervade not only philosophic and scientific discourse, but also epistolary writing, fiction and criticism. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of theorists from Adorno, Habermas and Foucault to Deleuze and Derrida, she offers a dialogue between the eighteenth century and our own, an ongoing exploration of the question, 'what is Enlightenment?'.

About this title

Review

"readers, especially intellectual historians of science, will find her treatment of Enlightenment text rewarding." The Historian

"This is a rich and impressive study." International Studies in Philosophy, Harvey Chisick

Book Description

This 1999 book surveys the past fifty years of philosophical reflection on the Enlightenment, and takes issue both with traditional liberal and with contemporary critical accounts. Through close analysis of philosophical, scientific and literary texts, it emphasizes the urgency of maintaining a dialogue between past and present, Enlightenment and modernity.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 052165128X
• ISBN 13: 9780521651288
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 258