The claim that Rousseau's writings influenced the development of Kant's critical philosophy, and German idealism, is not a new one. As correct as the claim may be, it does not amount to a systematic ...account of Rousseau's place within this philosophical tradition. It also suggests a progression whereby Rousseau's achievements are eventually eclipsed by those of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, especially with respect to the idea of freedom. In this book David James shows that Rousseau presents certain challenges that Kant and the idealists Fichte and Hegel could not fully meet, by making dependence and necessity, as well as freedom, his central concerns, and thereby raises the question of whether freedom in all its forms is genuinely possible in a condition of human interdependence marked by material inequality. His study will be valuable for all those studying Kant, German idealism and the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas.
The French studies scholar Patrick Coleman made the important observation that over the course of the eighteenth century, the social meanings of anger became increasingly democratized. The work of ...Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an outstanding example of this change. In Man or Citizen , Karen Pagani expands, in original and fascinating ways, the study of anger in Rousseau’s autobiographical, literary, and philosophical works. Pagani is especially interested in how and to what degree anger—and various reconciliatory responses to anger, such as forgiveness—functions as a defining aspect of one’s identity, both as a private individual and as a public citizen. Rousseau himself was, as Pagani puts it, “unabashed” in his own anger and indignation—toward society on one hand (corrupter of our naturally good and authentic selves) and, on the other, toward certain individuals who had somehow wronged him (his famous philosophical disputes with Voltaire and Diderot, for example). In Rousseau’s work, Pagani finds that the extent to which an individual processes, expresses, and eventually resolves or satisfies anger is very much of moral and political concern. She argues that for Rousseau, anger is not only inevitable but also indispensable, and that the incapacity to experience it renders one amoral, while the ability to experience it is a key element of good citizenship.
Why did Rousseau fail—often so ridiculously or grotesquely—to live up to his own principles? In one of the most notorious cases of hypocrisy in intellectual history, this champion of the joys of ...domestic life immediately rid himself of each of his five children, placing them in an orphans' home. He advocated profound devotion to republican civic life, and yet he habitually dodged opportunities for political engagement. Finally, despite an elevated ethics of social duty, he had a pattern of turning against his most intimate friends, and ultimately fled humanity and civilization as such.In Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau, Matthew D. Mendham is the first to systematically analyze Rousseau's normative philosophy and self-portrayals in view of the yawning gap between them. He challenges recent approaches to "the Jean-Jacques problem, " which tend either to dismiss his life or to downgrade his principles. Engaging in a comprehensive and penetrating analysis of Rousseau's works, including commonly neglected texts like his untranslated letters, Mendham reveals a figure who urgently sought to reconcile his life to his most elevated principles throughout the period of his main normative writings. But after the revelation of the secret about his children, and his disastrous stay in England, Rousseau began to shrink from the ambitious philosophical life to which he had previously aspired, newly driven to mitigate culpability for his discarded children, to a new quietism regarding civic engagement, and to a collapse of his sense of social duty. This book provides a moral biography in view of Rousseau's most controversial behaviors, as well as a preamble to future discussions of the spirit of his thought, positing a development more fundamental than the recent paradigms have allowed for.
Rousseau caleidoscópico Max Rogério Vicentini
Revista espaço acadêmico,
03/2023, Volume:
7, Issue:
77
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
RESENHA MARQUES, José Oscar de Almeida (Org.). Verdades e mentiras: 30 ensaios em torno de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ijuí: Editora UNIJUÍ, 2005 (Coleção Filosofia; 15), 520 p.
Among Jean-Jacques Rousseau's chief preoccupations was the problem of self-interest implicit in all social relationships. A person with divided loyalties (i.e., to both himself and his cohorts) was, ...in Rousseau's thinking, a divided person. According to John Warner's Rousseau and the Problem of Human Relations, not only did Rousseau never solve this problem, he believed it was fundamentally unsolvable: social relationships could never restore wholeness to a self-interested human being. Warner traces his argument through the contours of Rousseau's thought on three distinct types of relationships— sexual love, friendship, and civil or political association. Warner concludes that none of these, whether examined individually or together, provides a satisfactory resolution to the problem of human dividedness located at the center of Rousseau's thinking. In fact, concludes Warner, Rousseau's failure to obtain anything hopeful from human associations is deliberate, self-conscious, and revelatory of a tragic conception of human relations. Thus Rousseau raises our hopes only to dash them.This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.
Originally published in 1979. Adultery is a dominant feature in chivalric literature; it becomes a major concern in Shakespeare's last plays; and it forms the central plot of novels from Anna ...Karenina to Couples. Tony Tanner proposes that transgressions of the marriage contract take on a special significance in the "bourgeois novels" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His interpretation begins with the general topic of adultery in literature and then zeroes in on three works—Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. His interpretation encompasses the role of women, the structure of the family, social mores, and the history of sexuality.
Rousseau has been seen as the inventor of the concept of nature; in this collective volume philosophers and literary specialists from France and the United States examine how Rousseau's philosophy ...can be reinterpreted from the point of view of a constant dialectical debate between nature and culture. In this, Rousseau is our true contemporary.
Making Citizens Trachtenberg, Zev M.
1993, 20130111, 2013-01-11, 19930101
eBook
By analysing Rousseau's conception of the general will, Zev Trachtenberg characterises the attitude of civic virtue Rousseau believes individuals must have to cooperate successfully in society. ...Rousseau holds that culture affects political life by either fostering or discouraging civic virtue. However, while the cultural institutions Rousseau endorses would motivate citizens to obey the law, they would not prepare citizens to help frame it. Rousseau's view of culture thus works against his account of legitimacy, and Trachtenberg concludes that Rousseau's political theory as a whole is inconsistent.
Se propone desarticular parte de la complejidad del problema de la propiedad privada en Rousseau de la siguiente forma: a) es un concepto que obedece a circunstancias muy precisas del contexto del ...filósofo ginebrino, el decaimiento del mundo feudal y el avance de la economía de mercado, la evolución del capitalismo; b) es un concepto que en el cuerpo de su obra lo piensa y reflexiona como una novedosa realidad c) para dicho concepto Rousseau abreva de las discusiones planteadas con fisiócratas (economistas), juristas (iusnaturalistas) y filósofos tanto liberales como republicanos que debido a que no concebían su disciplina como una ciencia aislada de las demás, sino que cada una guardaba elementos de las otras pese a su naciente especificidad d) Al unísono de su contexto de Rousseau propone pensar la propiedad desde una filosofía política que integra cuatro flancos: lo político, lo moral, lo jurídico y lo económico. Palabras Clave: Propiedad privada, libertad civil, iusnaturalismo, fisiocracia, economía, política. In this paper is proposed to dismantle part of the complexity of the problem of private property in Rousseau in the following way: a) it is a concept that obeys very precise circumstances in the context of the Genevan philosopher, the decay of the feudal world and the advance of the market economy , the evolution of capitalism; b) it is a concept that in the body of his work he thinks and reflects on it as a new reality c) for this concept Rousseau draws on the discussions raised with physiocrats (economists), jurists (jusnatrualist) and both liberal and republican philosophers who due to that they did not conceive their discipline as a science isolated from the others, but that each one kept elements of the others despite its emerging specificity d) In unison with its context, Rousseau proposes to think of property from a political philosophy that integrates four sides, which political, moral, legal and economic. Keywords: Private property, civil liberty, iusnaturalism, physiocracy, economics, politics.
