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
8 - The Religious Thought
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
Kant held that Newton and Rousseau had revealed the ways of Providence: “After Newton and Rousseau, God is justified, and Pope's thesis is henceforth true”
Rousseau discussed Providence and Pope's thesis, that “Whatever is, is right,” most fully in a long letter that he wrote to Voltaire in 1756, approximately a year after the publication of the Discourse on Inequality (1755), at a time when he is likely also to have done work on the Essay on the Origin of Languages. These three writings, the Discourse,- together with Rousseau's replies to the criticisms of it by the Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet, writing under the pseudonym Philopolis, and by the Master of the King's Hunt, Charles-George Le Roy, writing under the name Buffon - the Essay, and the Letter to Voltaire, form a unit: They consider the natural order and man's place in it more specifically than do any of his other writings. The Discourse is the only one of these publications that Rousseau himself initiated. The Letter to Voltaire differs from the other writings in this group by discussing man’s place in the natural world in theological terms. Indeed, it is the only record we have of a theological discussion that Rousseau freely initiated with a near equal: "a friend of the truth speaking to a Philosopher" [2].
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau , pp. 193 - 246Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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