This is the first comprehensive study in English of Voltaire's contes philosophiques--the philosophical tales for which he is best remembered and which include his masterpiece Candide. Pearson situates each story in its historical and intellectual context and offers new readings in light of modern critical thinking. He rejects the traditional view that Voltaire's contes were the private expression of his philosophical perplexity, and argues that it is narrative that is Voltaire's essential mode of thought. His book is a witty, lucid, (...) and scholarly guide to the "fables of reason" through which Voltaire's skepticism undermined the contemporary religious and philosophical explanations of human experience. (shrink)

Summary In about 1735, Emilie Du Châtelet began to translate Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her work, which is largely ignored by scholars, did, as this article demonstrates, turn out to be one of transformation rather than of translation and came at a crucial moment in the emerging French luxury debate. So far commercial society and luxury had been defended in purely economic terms, for instance in Melon's Essai politique, or as an aspect of divine providence for fallen man, (...) by Pierre Nicole amongst others. There was as yet no coherent defence on the level of secular ethics. As this article shows, Du Châtelet set out to remedy this. In co-operation with Voltaire, with whose recent praise of English society in the Lettres philosophiques she strongly identified, she rewrote the Fable to offer a defence of modern commercial society as both natural and moral. The article argues that she was able to do so by taking recourse to classic Epicureanism in the guise of Lucretius' De rerum natura, as an alternative to the Neo-Epicureanism, with its Augustinian overtones, as espoused by Mandeville. Voltaire in turn used her translation to lay the foundations for his defence of commercial society and progress in his Traité de métaphysique in which he uses the precise passages she had inserted into Mandeville's original. This article analyses the further aspects Voltaire adds to her arguments. Taken together, Du Châtelet's ?translation? and Voltaire's Traité offer a coherent defence of bourgeois society that would underlie Voltaire's later historiographical and philosophical works and which were crucial to his concept of ?Enlightenment? and ?progress? (shrink)

Why do Americans, and so often, American writers, profess moral sentiments and yet write so little in the traditionally "moralistic" genres of maxim and fable? What is the relation between "moral" concerns and literary theory? Can any sort of morality survive the supposed nihilism of deconstruction? Jefferson Humphries undertakes a discussion of questions like these through a comparative reading of the ways in which moral issues surface in French and American literature. Humphries takes issue with the "amoral" view of (...) deconstruction espoused by many of its detractors, arguing that the debate between the theory's advocates and opponents comes down to two opposing literary and moral traditions. While the American tradition views morality as a rigid system capable of being enforced by injunctions along the lines of "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not," the French tradition conceives of morality as a function of a relentless and unsentimental pursuit of truth, and finally, an admission that "truth" is not a static thing, but rather an ongoing process of rigorous thought. (shrink)

This article situates Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution in the traditions of French and American revolutionary historiography to demonstrate that Arendt’s ‘fable’ of the American Revolution was at odds with her argument about the council form. I argue that had Arendt really wanted to inspire a resurrection of the council form in the present, she would have done better to orient her readers to the French Revolution, specifically to the experiments in democratic republicanism of the group known as the (...) Girondins. (shrink)

The comments on the French Revolution by the young Marx and Engels are well-known and have been abundantly discussed. However, what is less known is that they belonged to a generation of German intellectual activists who, in the 1830s and 1840s, constantly used the French Enlightenment as a key reference to assess contemporary German philosophy and political life. This article provides an analysis of the two diverging positions on such questions articulated by two representatives of this generation: Ludwig (...) Börne who elaborated a German version of Jacobinism, and Bruno Bauer, a young Hegelian who promoted a German philosophical revolution whose radicalism and spiritual depth was capable of surpassing that of the French Revolution. Thus, as underlined by Lucien Calvié, the relationship of German intellectuals to the French Revolution during the Vormärz (pre-March) appears as an ambiguous one: just as the fox with the grapes in La Fontaine’s fable, left-wing Germans viewed revolutionary France with a mixture of envy and frustration. (shrink)

In French schools, La Fontaine is presented as “the height of French culture,” but he was only marginally inspired by French poets. His main sources were Spanish and Italian authors, as well as classics of both the Occident and Orient. In this way La Fontaine exemplifies, for Serres, a general pattern in which “cultures grow at the crossroads of other cultures.” One's identity develops out of numerous contacts with others, by learning from them and assimilating some of (...) their qualities—by being open to, not isolated from, the rest of the world. The non-French genealogy of the fables puts in doubt the entrenched concept of identity as involving separation and isolation.Their genealogy also sets a limit on political and moralistic interpretations of La Fontaine's stories. At school, pupils are taught that the Lion stands for the King, the Fox for the Nobles, the Lamb for the Poor. But is it possible, Serres asks, that so many poets from diverse times and places have been describing “the same society with the same hierarchies submitted to the same laws”? As for moralistic readings, Serres shows that for each fable there is a counterfable in which the winner becomes the loser. The Wolf that eats the Lamb in one fable is killed by the Hunter in another. In “The Two Mules,” the animal loading the salt is murdered by bandits, whereas in “The Ass with a Load of Sponges and the Ass with a Load of Salt,” it is the latter that survives. In other words, the fables illustrate how beings metamorphose into one another: the Wolf (the attacker) can appreciate and play the role of the Lamb (the victim) when chased by the Hunter; salt can lead to death or to freedom, depending on the circumstances. The fables, taken together, offer a collection of behaviors that we, humans and animals, are capable of: our “so-called moralities,” Serres explains, “don't speak about ethics, but about ethology.”The fables offer as well a “palimpsest [that] lies silently in our bodies and our practices.” Serres speculates that the oldest forms of the fables were not spoken, but gesticulated; they mimed animal behaviors. By imitating them, we humans not only learned about the animals we were observing and living with but also about the potentialities of our own bodies. If La Fontaine became the epitome of French culture by assimilating elements of other cultures, then it was by embodying animal behaviors that we became human. (The omnipresence of prepositions in the fables—next to, in front of, under, above—suggests that the body underpins the stories. Those little words, which Serres analyzes minutely in a long chapter, locate each body in relation to those of other beings.)Serres was planning to write a book about La Fontaine as early as 1997. In his notebooks, he scribbled possible titles, all of which are evocative: “Archaeology of Miming,” “Anthropology of Simulation,” “The Fabulous Bodies of Animals,” “The Scale and the Net.” Sadly, he died in 2019 when his work on the manuscript was progressing. He had not yet settled on a definitive title, nor had he decided the order of the chapters and sections. Jean-Charles Darmon, who was allowed to edit the work, faced chapters that were almost completed but others consisting of a single line suggesting a main idea. (The blanks are often about a type of fable never defined or described: “fables of representation.”) In spite of its incompleteness, this book intermingles systematic analysis, textual and historical contextualization, and philosophical speculation—in it, we find the conceptual inventiveness, the lexical and etymological alertness, and above all the joyfulness that characterize the whole of Serres's extraordinary oeuvre. (shrink)

ExcerptThe French political theorist George Sorel repeatedly prophesied that Europe would provide the future soil of armed cataclysms.1 Furthermore, he claimed that the catalyzing factors for the conflicts of political power that lay behind such eruptions of violence and anarchy were myths, conceived not in the anthropological sense but as a series of images formed into a dramatic narrative capable of mobilizing social movements and inspiring violence to change the status quo. Thomas Mann lent weight to such an analysis (...) when he predicted that “in the era of the masses, parliamentary discussion would necessarily prove utterly inadequate as a means of shaping political will.” Thus, “in the future what was needed in its place were mythic fictions, which would be fed to the masses as the primitive battle cries necessary for unleashing and activating political energies.” Henceforth “popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle of political action—fables, chimeras, phantasms that needed to have nothing whatever to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive nonetheless.”. (shrink)

"When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, the University of Chicago Press launches an ambitious series of English translations of these important works based upon the meticulously established original French editions." "In this seminar from 2001 and 2002, Derrida explores the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty and continues his deconstruction of the (...) traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law - the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine's fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," Hobbes's biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence's poem "Snake," Machiavelli's Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau's evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract." "Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal." --Book Jacket. (shrink)

Fromental Halévy was thirty-six when his masterpiece, La Juive, a grand opera in five acts, was triumphantly produced at the Opéra , and at once secured for its author a European reputation. The opera was presented with unprecedented scenic splendor, the stage-setting alone having cost, it was said, 150,000 francs. La Juive , with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots , marked the defining expression of French Grand Opera. Both operas used highly controversial and sensitive historical material as the very fabric of (...) their artistic medium. The explosive themes of religious and racial bigotry, leading to execution and massacre, were devised and sustained impressively by the playwright and librettist Eugène Scribe , whose fables of intolerance and death seized the public imagination. They presented parables for reflection on contemporary times and the dangers posed to humanity by politics and religion, woven into themes such as Orthodoxy and Purity, Justice and Mercy, the Fire of Truth. In terms of historical background, theological implication, and purely human tragedy, the scenario of La Juive provides a depth and richness of semiotic discourse, a sustained exploration of a complex and many-faceted subject, whose caveats on social intolerance become only ever more topical and pertinent. (shrink)

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including _Genesis._ Lawrence R. Schehr is professor of (...) French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include _Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal _. (shrink)

Let us hypothesize that there are three main "registers" of writing: narrative, description and commentary. "Narrative" and "description" are by definition concerned with diachronic and synchronic relationships ; and it may be said that taken together, they therefore exhaust the inventory of all relationships constituting the "world" our language regards as possible. It is often remarked that there is such an affinity between narration and description that on occasion they are hard to distinguish: narration is the description of an action (...) or change, and description mimes the action of relating items one to the other, and hence may have a narrative function. This solidarity of narration and description justifies their being grouped together as constituting the "topic" of literary discourse. But the function of "commentary," which correlates the text with a context, is to create a different type of relationship, in which makes the narrative/descriptive topic "meaningful." We are thus distinguishing "meaning" and "meaningfulness" on the grounds that "meaning" can be understood as the object of semantic analysis , whereas "meaningfulness" is the meaning bestowed on a set of relationships by an act of interpretation . This type of meaningfulness is what the moral of a La Fontaine fable most characteristically seeks to create. Thus, the two-line commentary segment in Le Chat, la Belette et le petit Lapin: Ceci ressemble fort aux débats qu'ont parfoisLes petits souverains se rapportants aux rois1 designates the narrative/descriptive relationships established on the fable proper , designates the pragmatic context , but also specifies the analogy/homology between the two which makes the text meaningful . Meaningfulness in this sense is thus definable as the perception of a text/context relationship. · 1. "This greatly resembles the debates which petty sovereigns have when they refer to kings." [My translation] Ross Chambers, Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is the author of Gérard de Nerval et la poétique du voyage, La Comédie au château, L'Ange et l'automate, "Spirite" de Théophile Gautier, and Room for Maneuver: Reading Oppositional Narrative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal CommunityPaul HendricksonThe University of South Carolina. Hauke Brunkhorst. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. xxv + 262. $42.50, hardcover.Public appeals to solidarity have been pervasive throughout the storied history of political dissent and democratic politics. From the French Revolution and the European revolutions of 1848 to decolonization, Polish Solidarność, and the antiglobalization movement, solidarity has been invoked as a means (...) of reinventing citizenship, rights, and community. Yet political theorists have not generally accorded the concept of solidarity a degree of attention comparable to that afforded other core political concepts, such as freedom, equality, and deliberation. In Solidarity, Hauke Brunkhorst seeks to remedy this neglect, arguing that the concept of solidarity should be deemed fundamental to democratic theory and practice: "In modern societies, solidarity coincides with the concept of democracy" (xxiii). Brunkhorst presents this thesis as a corrective to current theory, but he also develops it—in the spirit of much Frankfurt School theorizing—as a Zeitdiagnose, as a timely diagnosis, regarding the threats globalization poses to democratic self-governance: "Power, law, and money are globalized [today] at the expense of democratic solidarity" (7).Solidarity, as Brunkhorst understands it, is a thoroughly modern concept. The "ideas of 1789"—in particular, the fraternité of the French Revolution—provided the historical foundation for an egalitarian and democratic model of solidarity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of solidarity [End Page 343] gradually replaced that of fraternity in the wake of industrialization. Drawing on Marx, Brunkhorst argues that what promoted working-class solidarity was "not the local sympathy of communal relations or the friendly affection... of a tightly structured polis," but rather the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph (60). Brunkhorst's historiography is woven into a broad social-theoretic framework. Following Durkheim, he reasons that the modern division of labor is not founded on the mechanical solidarity of Gemeinschaft, on a shared sense of affinity, ritual, and communal belonging, but on the organic solidarity of Gesellschaft, on the integration of an individualized, pluralist, and functionally differentiated society.To readers acquainted with contemporary German appropriations of the sociological tradition, many of Brunkhorst's conceptual moves will seem familiar. But his unique fusion of social-theoretic and historical argumentation yields a fascinating and novel characterization of solidarity. For Brunkhorst, solidarity is not a form of sentiment or emotional bond; it is not premised on compassion for "tormentable bodies" (Brecht) or on a "flexible feeling of sympathy" (Rorty); rather, "it is nothing but the democratic realization of individual freedom" (3). This normative model of solidarity is guided by the regulative ideal of a political association without domination; it envisages a polity in which the individual is neither servant nor master to her compatriots. As modes of governance become increasingly globalized, democratic forms of solidarity must reach beyond the rights traditions of particular nation-states to include a "human-rights patriotism."Brunkhorst traces this ideal back to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Drawing principally on the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers, he argues that civic friendship (philia) provided a space for mutual freedom, emancipated individuals from the bonds of kinship, generalized friendship into a form of patriotism (philia politike), and realized the universal essence of man as a political being. But this civic-republican model remained profoundly elitist, excluding the many on the basis of gender, class, and citizenship status. More suggestive and original is Brunkhorst's treatment of Jewish and Christian thought. The intersection between rhetoric and philosophy is central to his interpretation of the Exodus story and covenant theology as a form of collective countermemory and as a prophetic practice of critique. Through his reading of the Jotham fable and other biblical narratives, he argues that the Jewish prophets and the Christian New Testament avowed "the equal proximity of all humans to God" and contributed to a "prophetic project of egalitarian solidarity" (33, 36). [End Page 344]Brunkhorst's historical reconstructions culminate in the French Revolution. On his view, the otherworldly universalism of the Judeo-Christian tradition was secularized and institutionalized in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and the first French... (shrink)

From accounts of migration and stories of personal alienation, through the fragmented memories of former incarnations, to fable-like tales of half-breeds and species metamorphosis, Ying Chen's fiction evolves as it revolves around questions of difference, otherness and identity, which is never fixed or singular. While presenting the narrators' inner preoccupations and, in some cases, unreliable nature, the increasingly complex texts of this francophone-Chinese writer (1961-) also reveal larger concerns about dominant discourses, the limitations of social realities, survival, and the relationship (...) between beings, all framed within an aesthetics of non-belonging. Intriguingly, the author achieves this by consciously distancing her works, from 1998 onwards, from any categorisation by ethnicity. This engaging study considers Chen's writing from the contemporary perspective of the breakdown of traditional spatiotemporal experiences, the homogenization of places, the erasure of cultural differences, and the resulting tendency towards universalism. Rosalind Silvester is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and Director of Education in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen's University Belfast. (shrink)

Depuis plusieurs années, Michel Onfray s'offre tous les plateaux télé, la radio et la presse pour dire qu'il est un contestataire et un rebelle. Les médias lui offrent des colonnes et des boulevards et il est régulièrement sollicité pour livrer son avis sur les gens, le monde, la politique, les faits de société. Il réalise l'acrobatie étonnante d'être un incontournable du système médiatique et commercial tout en prétendant combattre ce système. Ce livre a pour objet de disséquer, d'analyser et de (...) démontrer le mythe Onfray, une fable médiatique créée de toutes pièces par une industrie bien huilée qui avait besoin qu'un prétendant occupe le siège vacant de l'intellectuel de service. Mission accomplie. Mais Michel Onfray est-il le philosophe de génie que nous vendent les médias? Est-il un intellectuel crédible? En réalité sa vision du monde est binaire, schématique ; son rapport à l'Histoire sans nuance et ce qu'il prend pour la construction d'une pensée philosophique solide ressemble davantage à une crise d'adolescence qui n'a jamais fini. Sa critique politique est simpliste, sans surprise, totalement conforme aux dogmes du prêt-à-penser moderne. Les contradictions, les non-sens et les banalités abondent dans une oeuvre littéraire creuse et répétitive. Ce livre explore la réalité onfrayenne et en tire un bilan sans appel qui détricote le mythe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern EuropePeter N. MillerCharlotte Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xviii, 198p.Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), xviii, 449p.Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, (...) 1994), xxiv, 483p.Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1775 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), xv, 395p.Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), xiii, 217p.Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), viii, 270p.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), xiii, 338p.E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s “Fable”: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xii, 284p.The pre-modern political world was broken and remade in the two centuries that separate Montaigne from Jefferson. The long agony of the mixed constitution that began in the civil wars which raged in Iberia, France, the Low Countries, and England and seemed settled by the widespread adoption of the maxims of reason of state, revived at the end of the period, with revolution in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Geneva, and, more famously, [End Page 725] British North America and France. The problem, classically, turned on the location of sovereignty, or supreme authority, in political systems designed to balance and diffuse rather than concentrate power. When budget deficits and fratricidal culture wars raised the cry of “necessity”—with the knowledge, of course, that necessity knew no law—estates and kings across Europe found themselves at daggers drawn. The claim that the ruler, who naturally was wholly committed to the common good, had therefore the ability to take emergency action was used both by those accustomed to rule and those newly attained to it by force. The pursuit of an “interest” that was identified with the nation’s effectively marginalized discussions of right and law while still serving an essentially constitutional, justificatory role in political debate. But if unchecked authority was necessary in order to meet the challenge of a world characterized by change and chance and thus had to reside somewhere, was there anything that made its exercise by one body more appropriate than another? This was the question that lay behind the late eighteenth-century repudiation of the reason of state “solution” to the problem of the mixed constitution. The answer, which clearly underpinned the establishment in fact of what had first been theorized already a century earlier, was that only consent could legitimate the exercise of sovereignty in time of necessity.1Representation, in one form or another, was the acknowledged solution to the problem formulated by Hobbes: “the name of Tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of Sovereignty, be it in one, or many men, saving that they that use the former word are understood to be angry with them they call Tyrants.” But representation also acknowledged the reality behind the charged category of “citizenship”: most people in most places could not be said to live the life of the active citizen celebrated in Roman republican literature. Hence Hobbes’s attack on recourse to classical exempla in general, and the Libertas of Lucca in particular. The idea of civis as law-abiding subject was as radical a redrawing of the terms of debate as the identification of human nature with unsociability. Insofar as politics, classically, justified itself as the means for individual self-perfection, the practice of the ancient citizen could be conceived of as the practice of that best life speculated upon by philosophers. For the represented citizen, however, politics necessarily occupied a more subsidiary position. What, then, defined the best life to which he could aspire?There is no simple answer to this question, and the early modern ambivalence has persisted into our own time... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Hume and the Danish Debate about Freedom of the Press in the 1770sJohn Christian LaursenWhen the reception history of David Hume’s political writings is written, there will have to be some discussion of their fate in “peripheral” countries like Denmark. Hume’s “Of Liberty of the Press” was translated into Danish as early as 1771. It is not widely known that Denmark was the first country officially to declare (...) freedom of the press and that a lively debate broke out once such freedom was declared. Hume’s essay was put to work in that debate. The story of this translation provides insights into the influence of Hume’s ideas in peripheral countries in Europe, and of Denmark in continental European ideas. Among other things, here we have an example of Hume’s work used in a concrete propaganda battle.The Danish translation of Hume’s essay was published as the last of three supplemental essays in a 31-page pamphlet entitled Mr. F. A. de Voltaire’s Letter to His Majesty the King of Denmark concerning freedom of the press in his states, together with some essays of relevant content. 1 A copy can be found at the Royal Library in Copenhagen in volume twenty of the forty-five bound volumes of pamphlets and booklets from 1770 to 1773 which make up Luxdorph’s Collection of Press Freedom Writings. 2 These pamphlets, in German, French, and (mostly) Danish, were collected at the time by Bolle Willum Luxdorph, a Danish man of letters and court counselor. [End Page 167]The occasion for Voltaire’s letter and our pamphlet was King Christian VII’s declaration of freedom of the press in his territories (the Kingdoms of Norway and Denmark and the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein) on 4 September 1770. It was in the form of a Cabinet Order to his Danish Chancellery, in the following words:We are fully convinced that it is as harmful to the impartial search for truth as it is to the discovery of obsolete errors and prejudices, if upright patriots, zealous for the common good and what is genuinely best for their fellow citizens, because they are frightened by reputation, orders, and preconceived opinions, are hindered from being free to write according to their insight, conscience, and conviction, attacking abuses and uncovering prejudices. And thus in this regard, after ripe consideration, we have decided to permit in our kingdoms and lands in general an unlimited freedom of the press of such a form, that from now on no one shall be required and obliged to submit books and writings that he wants to bring to the press to the previously required censorship and approval, and thus to submit them to the control of those who have undertaken the business until now of inspecting them; so have we graciously revealed and made known this our will concerning our kingdoms to our Danish Chancellery. Given at Friedrichsberg, the 4 September 1770. Christian. 3The foregoing cabinet order was largely the idea of Johann Friedrich Struensee, court physician and soon to be Prime Minister for Christian VII. 4 Less than ten years earlier, two periodicals he was involved with when he lived in Danish Altona had been suppressed, 5 and when he came to power by a series of accidents, one of his first acts was to arrange for the king to declare freedom of the press. [End Page 168]Response to this declaration was immediate. In Denmark it led to a flurry of pamphlets on a myriad of topics, including the high cost of living and the salaries of ministers, 6 monopolies and trade issues (vol. III), coinage (vol. IV), civil servants, the public debt, the agricultural economy (vol. V), the abolition of tenant farmers’ work obligations (vol. VI), the Iceland trade (vol. VII), marriage law, breweries (vol. VIII), banks, lotteries (vol. IX), soldiers’ and sailors’ pay (vol. X), the Norwegian economy (vol. XI), the universities and academies (vol. XII), the power of women (vol. XIII), irreligion and impiety (vol. XIV), prophecies of doom (vol. XV), fables, allegories and libels (vols. XVI–XVIII), and the eternity of hell (vol. XIX).Many pamphlets discussed press freedom... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.4 (2006) 89-103 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Philosophical AestheticsDonald Phillip VereneIs there an aesthetics of philosophy? Does philosophical discourse have a foundation in sense and sensibility? If the answer to these questions is affirmative and there is in some sense a philosophical aesthetics, what conclusions might be drawn for philosophical education?Put another way: Does philosophy require the power of the imagination and the product (...) of this power-image? Or is philosophy the product of the pure concept, the rational idea? Does philosophical reason rest upon a logic that resides in thought alone that is expressed essentially in principles and arguments disconnected from images and sentiment?The Philosophical ImaginaryThe French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff says:Whether one looks for a characterization of philosophical discourse to Plato, to Hegel or to Bréhier, one always meets with a reference to the rational, the concept, the argued, the logical, the abstract. Even when a certain coyness leads some authorities to pretend that they do not know what philosophy is, no agnosticism remains about what philosophy is not. Philosophy is not a story, not a pictorial description, not a work of pure literature. Philosophical discourse is inscribed and declares its status as philosophy through a break with myth, fable, the poetic, the domain of the image. 1Le Doeuff continues:If, however, one goes looking for this philosophy in the texts which are meant to embody it, the least that can be said is that it is not to be found there in a pure state. We shall also find statues that breathe the scent of roses, comedies, tragedies, architects, foundations, dwellings, [End Page 89] doors and windows, sand, navigators, various musical instruments, islands, clocks, horses, donkeys and even a lion, representatives of every craft and trade, scenes of sea and storm, forests and trees: in short, a whole pictorial world sufficient to decorate even the dryest "History of Philosophy." 2Le Doeuff points to Hegel's work as an example of the claim that the sole form of philosophy is thought. Yet the works of Hegel, like those of Plato, are full of images. Plato and Hegel are masters of metaphor. One can say of them what Aristotle says in the Poetics, that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others and it is a sign of genius. For the right use of metaphor requires an eye for similarities in dissimilars." 3 Despite his mastery of metaphor, in the Republic Plato uses his doctrine of eidos to criticize the power of eikon to present truth. Hegel, in the Phenomenology, uses his doctrine of the Begriff to claim that the Bild cannot produce the science of the absolute. Plato and Hegel say one thing in their texts, but in the texts themselves they do another. Plato's dialogues are filled with metaphors and likely stories from the Ring of Gyges to the metaphor of the Sun to the tale of Atlantis, as are Hegel's works, from the "night in which all cows are black" to the phrenological skull to the owl of Minerva that flies only at the falling of dusk.How are we to comprehend the extremes of philosophical doctrine on the one hand and the discourse that expresses it on the other? Is the discourse simply the outer shell of the doctrine, inessential to its truth, or does the doctrine itself require for its truth all that is needed for its proper statement?I wish to seek the answer to this by connecting Plato to Hegel, using Vico as an intermediary, in particular Vico's conception of la sapienza poetica (poetic wisdom) and his conception of the universale fantastico (imaginative universal). My claim is that philosophical discourse, as well as philosophy itself, depends upon an aesthetic that cannot be overcome by reason, that there is a philosophical imaginary that necessarily accompanies philosophical rationality. The concept, the idea, always has a shadow, a doppelgänger through which... (shrink)

The article deals with a seldom exposed but ubiquitous method in the 18th century philosophy, named conjectural history by Dugald Stewart. Its characteristic feature is a peculiar combination of historically verified facts and speculations, which in some authors are even openly fictitious. The hypotheses about prehistory (always set forth in the form of temporal historical narrative) are meant to aid a certain classic philosophical topos of the 18th century: the quest for origins. The article first surveys and compares common points (...) as well as peculiarities of various “treatises on the origins” in the Scottish and French Enlightenment. In the second half it focuses on an implicit but clearly identifiable conjectural history in Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, and on the application of conjectural history in the domain of the intellect and knowledge in the Encylopédie. It seems that the genealogy of knowledge in d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse most manifestly confirms the initial designation of conjectural history: that it is in fact another name for philosophy. If this holds true, than it might prove useful to search for its first seeds in Descartes’ Discourse on method, a work which places itself on the cross-section of history and fable. (shrink)

"I shall here present my life," writes Descartes in Discourse on Method, "as in a painting" and my method "as a fable." Through the Eyes of Descartes demonstrates how a Cartesian aesthetics is interwoven in his thought. It brings together a variety of materials: his metaphysical writings and essays in natural philosophy, through to his letters, drawings, and printed images. Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback seek to bring Descartes into dialogue with contemporary phenomenology as well as contemporary psychoanalytic (...) thought. They focus on how perception interacts with emotions and thought, and the way in which our gaze is directed toward limit-phenomena of beauty and fascination. In Through the Eyes of Descartes, Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback counter the traditional picture of Descartes by presenting his work in an entirely different light: a Descartes of the arts, of sensibility, of inner images, and of imagination. (shrink)

An extensive literature overlapping economics, statistical decision theory and finance, contrasts expected utility [EU] with the more recent framework of mean–variance (MV). A basic proposition is that MV follows from EU under the assumption of quadratic utility. A less recognized proposition, first raised by Markowitz, is that MV is fully justified under EU, if and only if utility is quadratic. The existing proof of this proposition relies on an assumption from EU, described here as “Buridan’s axiom” after the French (...) philosopher’s fable of the ass that starved out of indifference between two bales of hay. To satisfy this axiom, MV must represent not only “pure” strategies, but also their probability mixtures, as points in the (σ, μ) plane. Markowitz and others have argued that probability mixtures are represented sufficiently by (σ, μ) only under quadratic utility, and hence that MV, interpreted as a mathematical re-expression of EU, implies quadratic utility. We prove a stronger form of this theorem, not involving or contradicting Buridan’s axiom, nor any more fundamental axiom of utility theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Modern Maistre. The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de MaistreAbraham AndersonOwen Bradley. A Modern Maistre. The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pp. 320. $55.00.In A Modern Maistre, Owen Bradley has sought to defend both the theoretical penetration and the practical wisdom of Joseph de Maistre, most famous of all "reactionaries" or royalist opponents of the French (...) Revolution. Bradley's own explicit philosophical premises are those of the contemporary academic Left—the blend of Foucault, Adorno, and other authors commonly known as "theory." He defends Maistre's claims on our attention partly by pointing to the kinship between the latter's critique of the Enlightenment and that of Foucault, Adorno, et al. Further, Bradley reminds us of the intimate relation between anti-revolutionary thought and historicism, here understood as the doctrine that new climates of belief and social arrangements always have their roots in what precedes them. In this as in other respects he allows us to see the kinship between the thought of Maistre and that of his younger and more liberal contemporary Tocqueville.Maistre was, moreover, a seminal thinker for the French tradition of sociology whose best-known representatives are Comte and Durkheim, and which, like him, was concerned above all with the religious conditions of social order. Maistre was himself a disciple not just of Vico's New Science but of Plato's Republic and Laws, works equally preoccupied with this topic. One of the most interesting themes of the book, in fact, is Maistre's concern with political theology.Maistre was particularly attracted, Bradley shows, to the neo-Platonic and possibly heterodox theology of Origen. The neo-Platonic emphasis on symbols, talismans, and cosmic hierarchy, according to Bradley, helped Maistre formulate his criticism of the "mechanical philosophy" of the Cartesian Enlightenment, the metaphysical premise, according to Maistre, of the Revolution. Maistre, Bradley shows us, argued against the Enlightenment's attempt to replace a politics dependent on faith with one based on modern science partly by showing that modern science itself has its roots in mysticism, magic, and enthusiasm. The Enlightenment, which understood itself as entirely secular in spirit, was ruled by a project of salvation descended from ancient gnosticism. As the gnostics sought salvation through the rejection of the world of creation, the Enlighteners sought political salvation through a rejection of all traditions and institutions, a project which culminated in the Jacobin Terror.But political violence, in Maistre's view, does not stem from theological error alone. According to Maistre, "sacrifice" in the larger sense is central to all human societies. The problem of political order is in large part how to channel the impulse to collective cruelty, which is necessary to political order but can be restrained or allowed to run [End Page 287] wild. Politics is largely theater and symbol; the wise use of these elements is indispensable for taming the love of violence.Maistre's famous assertion of the authority of the Pope is not, Bradley insists, a formula for theocracy; rather, the preservation of a spiritual power distinct from and independent of the sovereign serves to check tyranny without subverting sovereignty (132). Such a spiritual power is necessary partly to preserve "unity of fables, which will never happen without unity of doctrine and authority" (195).Maistre's interest in political theology is continuous with an interest in the political significance of cosmology. Every society, Maistre held, including the Enlightenment, has a view of the cosmos to which its conception of society precisely corresponds. Maistre himself seeks to inflect modern cosmology in various ways. Like Tocqueville and Vico, Maistre uses the doctrine of historical forces to propound a teaching on Providence. The Jacobins themselves, Maistre asserts, were instruments of Providence. Far from emancipating mankind, the Revolution "abruptly shortened" the "chain that binds man" within his proper bounds (215).Bradley does Maistre a valuable service by criticizing misinterpretations of his thought by later defenders of extra-constitutional authority, like Maurras and Carl Schmitt; Maistre himself, Bradley shows, was deeply concerned to preserve constitutional legitimacy and opposed absolutism. Bradley's most interesting chapter is his last one, on Maistre... (shrink)

In recent years, the problem of value has been drastically pushed away towards the periphery of the discipline of literary studies. More and more, this fact has come to be experienced as a source of frustration and misunderstandings.1 In this article, I would like to show the great extent to which a value-oriented approach is in fact inevitable. By the same token, however, I will also indicate the disturbing ambiguities that the consideration of the value-dimension may reveal. The example I (...) will use for my demonstration, the case of the French photographic novel , is fairly straightforward , but at the same time it betrays my slightly polemical intentions, since this genre is undoubtedly held in low esteem both within and without the domain of literary scholarship.It seems reasonable to assume that our twentieth century, with its turbulent successions of competing fashions and trends, has radically affected the concept of value, that is, the dialectical game of valorization and devalorization. The notion of value has of course become subject to “devaluations” on the content-level, as the mixtures and the instabilities of the criteria called on clearly lattest.2 In addition—and more important—value has been disobjectified, that is, snatched from the object of the judgment and located on the side of the judging subject. Jan Baetens teaches French at the Vlaamse Economische Hogeschool . He is the author of three books: Aux frontiers du récit: “Fable” de Robert Pinget comme “nouveau nouveau roman” ; Hergé écrivain: microlectures de Tintin ; and Les Mesures de l’excès: notes pour un traverse de “Eglogues” de Renaud Camus et al. . He is currently at work on the various aspects of grammatextuality in literature and the comics. (shrink)

This paper seeks to show that Bernard Mandeville's primary purpose in The Fable of the Bees was to historicize the concept of self?love (amour?propre) articulated by seventeenth?century French Jansenists and moralistes; that in doing so Mandeville constructed a theory designed to explain the inter?subjective constraints and forces of social discipline which characterize commercial societies; and that a full understanding of Mandeville's achievement depends upon an appreciation of the way in which pride in his theory becomes socialized into hypocrisy at (...) a decisive moment in the civilizing process, a moment after which, Mandeville argues, cultural institutions themselves can contain that unfettered self?interest which his contemporaries fearfully associated with the triumph of commerce. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 239-259 [Access article in PDF] Love Against Revenge in Shelley's Prometheus David Bromwich I THE MODERNIST PREJUDICE AGAINST SHELLEY has almost disappeared, but when I talk to friends I discover that few have ever cared for his poetry, and if they go back now to read him sometimes they reinvent the prejudice. This resistance is not indifference. Shelley can disturb one's self-knowledge and even (...) one's idea of what self-knowledge may be; and in reaction against the unheard-of demand he routinely makes, one is apt to dismiss him as extravagant. Much of Shelley continues to be outside my range, and occasionally I feel him pulling farther away, as if his starting point were my outermost limit. The fact is shaming enough to prompt a decorous defensiveness. Yet in many of his most far-fetched poems, it seems to me, he justifies his procedures as one looks for a great artist to do. The main reason we find his poetry difficult is its difficulty.Shelley was a member of the first generation to accept the French Revolution as an accomplished change in the world. It was, he thought, a change for the better; he considered himself a revolutionary, though the Terror and the Napoleonic wars left their chastening mark on him. A sentence from the Preface to The Revolt of Islam, of 1817, states most clearly an intuition he held as deeply a year later when he wrote the first act of Prometheus Unbound: "There is a reflux in the tide of human things which bears the shipwrecked hopes of men into a secure haven after the storms are past." 1 Humanity, by the adaptive work of thoughts and feelings, will prove to have readied itself for any great mutation that occurs in society; so that the violence of a revolution is likely to be [End Page 239] extrinsic and unnecessary. The reasons for the assurance implicit here are brought forward in the two great prose works of his last years, A Defence of Poetry and A Philosophical View of Reform. By the time any revolution happens in life, Shelley believes, it has already happened in language, with causes that are as visible as the difference between a living and a dead metaphor. Poetry—by which he means anything imaginative and man-made whose good survives the defects of its maker—"redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." He thinks that poets (including some lawgivers and social critics) are "the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present." The last phrase, from the closing paragraph of A Defence of Poetry, seemed to Shelley important enough to be used also in A Philosophical View of Reform. For him, the principle of reform in language is identical with the principle of reform in thought and action.His doctrine belongs to the high Enlightenment, and he had accepted, more complacently, I believe, in his poetry than in his prose, the idea of the poet or thinker or man-of-mind as a bringer of light to humanity. That ideal was strong in Wordsworth too, with his conception of the poet as "the rock of defence for human nature," but in Shelley it exists in tension with another belief: that the instinct for acting and suffering at the bidding of a nature "not our own" may become as general as the appeal of the revolution now accomplished. Only in having a language for thoughts and feelings does the poet differ from other men and women. This, for Shelley, is a difference not (as it was for Wordsworth) between a speaker and a listener, but rather like that between a translator and a reader. If the poet were unique in the way a revolutionary leader is unique, he would be the protagonist of a fable of revenge that needs likewise its antagonist. Our thoughts about change go along these lines because they tend to be thoughts about contest. But in his later poetry, and in Prometheus Unbound above all, Shelley was looking at... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deceit, Desire, and The Dunciad:Mimetic Theory and Alexander PopeAllan Doolittle (bio)Anxiety expressed over what is often termed "information overload"1 is by no means solely a phenomenon of our electronic age. Recent scholarship has traced this concern as far back as the early modern period. The increased production and dissemination of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a source of "wonder and anxiety"2 for authors and prompted the (...) need for a "substantial reorganization of the intellectual world."3 Seventeenth-century French scholar and critic Adrien Baillet gave warning of an impending barbarism unless there was a "separating [of] those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save."4 The most recognizable expression of this imperative to sort the printed wheat from the chaff comes from the voices of some of eighteenth-century England's most studied, most admired, yet also detested authors, the Scriblerians. From this celebrated literary group came "the three great Tory satires, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, John Gay's Fables and Alexander Pope's The Dunciad."5Christian Thorne, in his discussion of these works in relation to the rise of the public sphere in early modern England, defines the Scriblerian rallying cry as a protest against "the rise of print culture... in which signification will [End Page 1] run amok, flooding the polity with an undifferentiated mass of contradictory opinions and arguments and thus corroding traditional forms of citizenship or civic virtue."6 Pope saw the deluge of aspiring authors and their printed output as a destructive force, a force that had a leveling effect on what he perceived as the traditional structure of the cultural hierarchy. In this article, I will look specifically at the career of Alexander Pope and his lifelong struggle against all but a small number of those who populated what Samuel Johnson called the "Age of Authors."Pope's career is indelibly marked with conflict. This conflict stemmed from Pope's untiring efforts to regulate the field in which he worked, to promote himself and his friends, and to do everything at his disposal to thwart the efforts of those whom he saw as threatening his literary endeavors. His adversaries, most often the professional ranks of Grub Street writers and publishers, served as fodder for Pope's satire and were deeply entwined in Pope's literary output. However, the adversaries he most wanted to be rid of—the primary target of his purposeful and brilliant satire—were not the "hackney scribblers" typical of Grub Street but those most threatening to Pope's professional writing career: "verbal critics" or literary scholars.7 The threat came in the form of the newly emerging critical techniques of philological scholarship. It is my contention that the literary scholars possessed knowledge that Pope showed himself to be desirous of, but that he was incapable of attaining.In this paper I will apply René Girard's mimetic theory both to Pope's relationships with these scholars and to his depiction of them in The Dunciad. The application of Girard's theory helps to explain Pope's motivation in writing, expanding, and obsessing over a poem that was seemingly more trouble than it was worth. The publication history of the poem, which is "exceedingly complicated,"8 "cost [Pope] as much pains as anything [he] ever wrote"9 and brought down an avalanche of ridicule and abuse on him, prompting many to wonder "what can possibly have impelled him to do what he did?"10 This article will go some distance toward answering this question and will also provide insight into the way The Dunciad operated in the service of Pope's attempt to shape the literary culture of early-eighteenth-century England. I will do what no critic to date has yet attempted: I will use Girard's theory to clarify the relationship between Pope's work with the classics and that of his rival classical scholars, and to show how these two threads are woven into his magnum opus, The Dunciad.René Girard's insightful and controversial theory of the nature and origin of human culture may be grouped into three... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aelius Théon: ProgymnasmataGeorge A. KennedyMichel Patillon, ed., avec l'assistance pour l'Arménien de Giancarlo Bolognesi. Aelius Théon: Progymnasmata. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997. clvii + 229 pp. ( 1-120 double). Price not stated. (Editions Budé)Progymnasmata, handbooks of preliminary exercises in composition, are important sources for understanding Greek and Roman education and rhetoric and equally important in that the exercises they describe, including narrative, [End Page 476]fable, chria, encomium, ekphrasis, (...) synkrisis, prosopopoeia, and others, provided topics for literary genres in prose and poetry. Of the four surviving Greek treatises on progymnasmata, by or attributed to Theon, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and Nicolaus, Pseudo-Hermogenes and Aphthonius were the most influential. There are good editions of them by Hugo Rabe and of Nicolaus by Joseph Felton, all in the Teubner series. Theon's work is the earliest treatment and in some ways the most interesting, for it shows the system of rhetorical education in a developing stage and, since it is addressed to teachers rather than to students, it has much to say about pedagogical method. It has, however, been available only in reprints of Leonard Spengel's Rhetores Graeci(II 59-130), originally published in 1854, and in copies of a dissertation by James R. Butts (Claremont Graduate School, 1986). The new Budé Theon, with its lengthy introduction, French translation, and extensive learned notes, at last makes the work accessible to scholars in its full form.The Greek manuscripts of Theon's treatise break off abruptly in the discussion of the exercise for and against a law and lack chapters at the end where Theon discussed reading aloud, listening, paraphrase, elaboration, and contradiction. In addition, the original order of chapters was altered by some editor in late antiquity to conform better to what is found in Pseudo-Hermogenes and Aphthonius. Forty years ago Italo Lana projected a new edition, restoring the original sequence, and published a valuable study of the Greek textual tradition (Turin 1959), but he never completed the edition. The probable reason is that about that time the existence of a full translation of the work into classical Armenian had come to be known from two manuscripts in the State Library in Erivan, Armenia. Butts was aware of the existence of the Armenian translation but had no direct access to the contents.The Armenian translation was made from a Greek text before the rearrangement of the chapters and before the loss of the concluding pedagogical chapters. Patillon, in collaboration with Bolognesi, has reconstructed the Greek text on which the translation was based. It was so literal as to be almost incomprehensible in itself, but by comparison with the Greek in the large part of the work where both survive it has proved possible to reconstruct the Greek original with some probability. Patillon makes much use of this reconstruction throughout his text and apparatus and prints the Armenian text of the otherwise lost chapters, with French translation but without the Greek reconstruction.On the basis of a notice in the SoudaTheon is probably to be identified with Aelius Theon of Alexandria. There is reference in a newly discovered part of the text (Patillon, p. 106) to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which gives us a date after the first century B.C., and a possible reference to Theon in Quintilian (9.3.76), suggesting Theon may have been writing in the first century after Christ. The name Aelius might indicate a Hadrianic date but probably came into use in Egypt after the prefecture of Aelius Gallus in the Augustan period. [End Page 477]In any event, the work is clearly the earliest of the four major progymnasmatic treatises and has similarities to the Latin discussions of the exercises by Quintilian (1.9) and in Suetonius' De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus.Although there is much that deserves attention in the introduction and notes of this edition, readers will perhaps most want to know about passages where new readings in the Greek make a difference to the meaning and interpretation of passages, and also about the contents of the chapters that survive only in Armenian, here published for the first time. References are to page and line... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Adventures of Telemachus [1699] by François de Salignac de la Mothe-FénelonJean–Michel RacaultFrançois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. The Adventures of Telemachus [1699]. Translated with an introduction and notes by A. J. B. Cremer. London, Anastasis Books, 2022, 419 pp. Hardbound £24.50. Paperback £15. ISBN: 9781739798314.Fénelon’s 1699 novel The Adventures of Telemachus—or more precisely, the epic poem in prose—was one of the major bestsellers in many European countries (...) for nearly two centuries. The book inspired paintings, operas, fashions, and even wallpaper motifs. It gave birth to a literary subgenre, the “archeological novel,” such as Terrasson’s Sethos (1731) or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s L’Arcadie (1788), in which the action is located in an antique setting. Still part of French schools’ syllabi a century ago, this book mainly owes its survival today to highly specialized academic research, stimulated from time to time when an “Agrégation” program generates new publications, papers, and conferences, as happened in 2009–10. The situation is similar in English-speaking countries, if perhaps just a bit worse: new editions are scarce and generally based more or less on revised versions of eighteenth-century translations, such as those editions by John Hawkesworth’s (1768) or Tobias Smollett’s (1776).The publication by A. J. B. Cremer of an entirely new translation, featuring a close rendering of the French text into modern English and preserving the original’s formal dignity without resorting to a pastiche of the classical language, is therefore a landmark in the history of Fénelon’s reception, and in the valuation of Telemachus particularly. This edition, while intended for the general reader, includes most of what is expected of a scholarly edition. In a comparatively short introduction, the editor recalls the essential facts about the author’s background (as a descendent of high nobility) and about his ecclesiastic career, which was compromised by both his involvement in mystical spirituality (the quarrel over Quietism) and his critical attitude toward the absolutism of Louis XIV’s régime. [End Page 140]In fact, Fénelon’s appointment as Archbishop of Cambrai (1695) was a kind of exile. In 1689, however, he was appointed tutor to Louis XIV’s seven-year-old grandson, the young Duke of Burgundy, second in the line of succession to the throne after his father (though both died prematurely). Fénelon wrote for this boy The Adventures of Telemachus as an educative fiction in the tradition of the “mirrors of Princes.” Of course, such a book was not intended for publication, and when it appeared in 1699—strangely enough, in a fully legal manner and with a printing privilege—it was against Fénelon’s will and in a very faulty form, which was corrected in later editions. An editor today therefore faces solving some highly complex textual problems, and choosing between the manuscript traditions. Cremer’s translation is based upon Jacques Le Brun’s authoritative text, published in Fénelon’s Œuvres, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1997).1After surveying the critical reception of Telemachus, particularly in England, starting at the text’s first publication and reaching the present time, the introduction discreetly hints at an apparent trend, among some interpretations, toward Christian allegory. If the figure of Mentor obviously “represents Fénelon” in his tutorial role, Cremer notes, this character, also an incarnation of Minerva, embodies humanity and divinity simultaneously, and thus may be seen as a “Christ-figure,” with Telemachus as his disciple and Ulysses, with his pursuit of a never-ending quest, as the symbolic form of the Divine. These observations are not entirely new; they have been formulated before by various critics. The editor himself concurs with a well-known article by André Blanc that describes Fénelon’s neo-platonician turn of mind: for Fénelon there is no contradiction between Christian revelation and the pagan fables of classical mythology, which he considers prefigurations or allegories of Christianity.This interpretation is abundantly and convincingly confirmed in the editor’s annotations. While as expected the commentaries point frequently to Greco-Latin mythology or classical literary sources... (shrink)

SummaryToday remembered primarily as an eighteenth-century predecessor of laissez-faire economics, Bernard Mandeville's notorious Fable of the Bees marks the intersection of two modes of thought. On the one hand, Mandeville was a ‘moralist’ heir to the French Augustinianism of the previous century, viewing sociability as a mere mask for vanity and pride. On the other, he was a ‘materialist’ forerunner of economics, concerned to demonstrate the universality of human appetites for corporeal pleasures. The tension between these two modes of (...) thought results in ambivalences and contradictions—concerning the relative power of norms and interests, the relationship between motives and behaviours, and the historical variability of human cultures—that run throughout the Fable. Both traditions, with their attendant difficulties, have a long afterlife in the later history of the social sciences; understanding their origins in Mandeville's thought can help us get a firmer grip on problems that still trouble us today. (shrink)

• Why does topicalization decline in Middle English but not disappear? If the change a parametric one, it should go to completion. Otherwise, topicalization, a clear case of stylistic variation might be expected to be stable in frequency over time.

The view that quantum particles cannot be regarded as individuals was articulated in the early days of the 'quantum revolution' and became so well-entrenched that French and Krause called it 'the Received View'. However it was subsequently shown that quantum statistics is in fact compatible with a metaphysics of particle individuality, subject to certain caveats. As a consequent it has been claim that there exists a kind of underdetermination of the metaphysics by the physics which in turn has been (...) used to motivate a form of 'notice' structural realism. In this essay I will review this purported underdetermination and the motivation for structural realism that it purportedly provides in the context of recent developments in both the philosophy of physics and metaphysics. I aim to conclude that such developments reinforce the underdetermination and allow one to respond to certain critical concerns regarding its motivational power. (shrink)

Steven French articulates and defends the bold claim that there are no objects in the world. He draws on metaphysics and philosophy of science to argue for structural realism--the position that we live in a world of structures--and defends a form of eliminativism about objects that sets laws and symmetry principles at the heart of ontology.

Quasi-set theory has been proposed as a means of handling collections of indiscernible objects. Although the most direct application of the theory is quantum physics, it can be seen per se as a non-classical logic (a non-reflexive logic). In this paper we revise and correct some aspects of quasi-set theory as presented in [12], so as to avoid some misunderstandings and possible misinterpretations about the results achieved by the theory. Some further ideas with regard to quantum field theory are also (...) advanced in this paper. (shrink)

Steven French and Decio Krause examine the metaphysical foundations of quantum physics. They draw together historical, logical, and philosophical perspectives on the fundamental nature of quantum particles and offer new insights on a range of important issues. Focusing on the concepts of identity and individuality, the authors explore two alternative metaphysical views; according to one, quantum particles are no different from books, tables, and people in this respect; according to the other, they most certainly are. Each view comes with (...) certain costs attached and after describing their origins in the history of quantum theory, the authors carefully consider whether these costs are worth bearing. Recent contributions to these discussions are analyzed in detail and the authors present their own original perspective on the issues. The final chapter suggests how this perspective can be taken forward in the context of quantum field theory. (shrink)

Explores the philosophy of corporate responsibility in in terms of collective vs individualist theory. It reports and defends distinctions among collectivities that run counter to individualist theory, develops a theory of the corporation as a moral person, and provides applications of the theory to actual cases.

This paper considers some issues to do with valuational presentations of consequence relations, and the Galois connections between spaces of valuations and spaces of consequence relations. Some of what we present is known, and some even well-known; but much is new. The aim is a systematic overview of a range of results applicable to nonreflexive and nontransitive logics, as well as more familiar logics. We conclude by considering some connectives suggested by this approach.

Ontic structural realism argues that structure is all there is. In (French, 2014) I argued for an ‘eliminativist’ version of this view, according to which the world should be conceived, metaphysically, as structure, and objects, at both the fundamental and ‘everyday’ levels, should be eliminated. This paper is a response to a number of profound concerns that have been raised, such as how we might distinguish between the kind of structure invoked by this view and mathematical structure in general, (...) how we should choose between eliminativist ontic structural realism and alternative metaphysical accounts such as dispositionalism, and how we should capture, in metaphysical terms, the relationship between structures and particles. In developing my response I shall touch on a number of broad issues, including the applicability of mathematics, the nature of representation and the relationship between metaphysics and science in general. (shrink)

My purposes in this paper are to explain the constitutive-regulative distinction as set out by Kant in the Dialectic and Methodology, and to note its reappearance in contemporary philosophy.

In There Are No Such Things As Theories (French 2020), the reification of theories is critically analysed and rejected. My aim here is to tease out some of the implications of this approach first of all, for how we, philosophers of science, should view the history of science; secondly, for how we should understand the devices that we use in our own philosophical practices; and thirdly, for how we might think about the relationship between the history of science and (...) the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Stein once urged us not to confuse the means of representation with that which is being represented. Yet that is precisely what philosophers of science appear to have done at the meta-level when it comes to representing the practice of science. Proponents of the so-called ‘syntactic’ view identify theories as logically closed sets of sentences or propositions and models as idealised interpretations, or ‘theoruncula, as Braithwaite called them. Adherents of the ‘semantic’ approach, on the other hand, are typically characterised as (...) taking them to be families of models that are set-theoretic, according to Suppes and others, or abstract, as Giere has argued. da Costa and French (Science and Partial Truth. OUP, Oxford, 2003) suggested that we should refrain from ontological speculation as to the nature of scientific theories and models and focus on their appropriate representation for various purposes within the philosophy of science. Such an approach allows both linguistic and non-linguistic resources to play their appropriate role (see also French and Saatsi, Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the 2004 PSA Meeting, 78:548–559, 2006) and can be supported by recent case studies illustrating the heterogeneity of scientific practice. My aim in this paper is to further develop this ‘quietist’ view, and to indicate how it offers a fruitful way forward for the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Challenges conventional wisdom and presents the most up-to-date studies to define, quantify and test the predictions of the main models of implicit learning.