Diderot's Counterpoints: The Dynamics of Contrariety in His Major WorksVoltaire Foundation, 1998 - 318 Seiten The exhilarating brilliance of Diderot's ideas combined with the intractable difficulties we encounters in his writings place him among the most challenging and controversial of the philosophes. This book puts forward a clearer understanding of Diderot's perplexities by taking into account the dynamics of his thought processes, especially the mode, peculiar to him, of thinking via contrarieties. Uniquely among the philosophes, Diderot has the irregular habit of letting his ideas capsize and go into reverse, 'pro' turning into 'contra', 'yea' becoming 'nay' - without the author bothering to notice (much less to inform the reader) that he has completely changed his mind. The phenomenon is frequent; in a number of instances, it is impossible to 'make sense' of Diderot's writings unless we are alert to this even when it occurs, that is, alert the dynamics of contrariety. This feature of Diderot's mental processes has received little attention from scholars - for good reasons: contrarieties suggest that the movement of Diderot's thought is often neither logical nor even rational, that frequently his concepts do not remain fixed and stable, or add up along straight lines. The existence of contrarieties implies that, as Diderot wrote, his ideas proceed in discrete stages, creating an evolution of concepts whose values are not only changing, but often contradicting their previous meanings. Finally, contrarieties play against the principle, sacred to scholars of literature, that the ideas of work of art must have cogerence in order to be comprehensible. Accepting these challenges to tradition as the basis of his argument, Professor Rex proposes radically new analyses of almost all of Diderot's major works (the only significant omission, La Religieuse, has been extensively treated by Professor Rex elsewhere). In sum, this perception of the dynamics of Diderot's thought promises not only to alter fundamentally our understanding of his 'philosophy', but also to give a new sense of his importance in the Enlightenment. |
Inhalt
the dynamics of Classical contrarieties I | 1 |
Louis Michel Van Loo Portrait de M Diderot | 32 |
Carl Van Loo Portrait de Mme Van Loo | 33 |
Urheberrecht | |
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Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
actors actually aesthetic Alceste allegedly argument artist autres Batteux bien Bordeu Bougainville c'est character Chouillet Cicero claims Classical concept context contrapuntal contrariety contrary counterpoint created declares despite dialogue Diderot Diderot's text discourse discussion dramatic earlier edition eighteenth-century emotions Encyclopédie Entretiens être everything example fact fait famous femme Fénelon fiction Fils naturel final French gestures grammairiens philosophes Greuze harpsichord Hegel homme ideas imagination implies invented inversions Jacques le fataliste Jacques's Jean Jean Fabre Jean Starobinski l'ordre La Religieuse language langue Le Misanthrope least letter Lucretius Maître matter Mlle de Lespinasse Molière moral nature Nephew never Neveu de Rameau Nicolas Poussin painting pantomime paradox Paris passage perhaps person play portrait Poussin Premier qu'il Racine reader recognised Rêve de d'Alembert role Salon satire scene sense sensibilité serpent sexual sort sourds et muets stage story suggests supposedly theory thought tout traditional Voltaire word order