Early Modern French Thought

The Age of Suspicion
Erscheinungsjahr 2003
ISBN: 978-0-19-926146-8
Verlag: OUP Oxford

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 538 g

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 they see 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 human nature 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 French thinkers) is linked with their religious doctrines, especially their Augustinian emphasis on Original Sin.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moriarty, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Moriarty is Head of the School of Modern Languages and Professor of French Literature and Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous publications include Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (CUP 1988) and Roland Barthes (Polity 1991).