Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
- 2 A General Overview
- 3 Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Revenge of Pascal
- 4 Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
- 5 Rousseau's Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian Origins
- 6 Rousseau's General Will
- 7 Rousseau's Images of Authority (Especially in La Nouvelle Heloise)
- 8 The Religious Thought
- 9 Émile: Learning to Be Men, Women, and Citizens
- 10 Émile: Nature and the Education of Sophie
- 11 Rousseau's Confessions
- 12 Music, Politics, Theater, and Representation in Rousseau
- 13 The Motto Vitam impendere vero and the Question of Lying
- 14 Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim: Synthesis within A “Minor” Work
- 15 Ancient Postmodernism in the Philosophy of Rousseau
- Bibliography
- Index
15 - Ancient Postmodernism in the Philosophy of Rousseau
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
- 2 A General Overview
- 3 Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Revenge of Pascal
- 4 Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
- 5 Rousseau's Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian Origins
- 6 Rousseau's General Will
- 7 Rousseau's Images of Authority (Especially in La Nouvelle Heloise)
- 8 The Religious Thought
- 9 Émile: Learning to Be Men, Women, and Citizens
- 10 Émile: Nature and the Education of Sophie
- 11 Rousseau's Confessions
- 12 Music, Politics, Theater, and Representation in Rousseau
- 13 The Motto Vitam impendere vero and the Question of Lying
- 14 Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim: Synthesis within A “Minor” Work
- 15 Ancient Postmodernism in the Philosophy of Rousseau
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Unless it was Immanuel Kant, who declined to believe it, practically no one who lived in the age of enlightenment ever took note of that fact.1 The term The Enlightenment made its inaugural appearance in only the late nineteenth century, The Scottish Enlightenment was first ushered into print in the early twentieth century, and the Enlightenment Project, about which virtually every contemporary social philosopher now speaks with authority, is an expression invented more than thirty-five years after the demise of the Manhattan Project, whose adherents, by contrast, at least knew its name. Throughout its relatively brief history, The Enlightenment has largely assumed the identity assigned to it by its inventors determined to denigrate its achievement. The Oxford English Dictionary still defines The Enlightenment as an age of “ superficial intellectualism,” marked by “insufficient respect for authority and tradition” adding, for good measure, that a philosophe is “one who philosophizes erroneously” In the French language, matters are, if anything, worse still, as no Frenchman has ever managed to coin a term for The Enlightenment at all. At least God, even if He never existed either, somehow managed to get Himself invented, as Voltaire famously remarked, but not, alas, The Enlightenment. Frances Hutcheson in Glasgow observed that he was called New Light there, but no sparkling luminary in Paris, so far as I know, ever noticed that he was one of les lumières.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau , pp. 418 - 444Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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