Browse Items · Legacies of the Enlightenment

Nature: Course Notes from the College de France

Merleau-Ponty, one of the greatest 20th Century thinkers of perception, the body, and its operation in the natural world, gives a course on the history of nature and its relationship with human freedom and thinking. These are notes on the course…

Tags: disciplines, ethics, freedom, materialisms, mechanism, organism, perception, philosophy, physics, physiology, science

La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine

Vartanian establishes the authoritative French text of La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine, and several essays on its background, claims, its materialism, and its place in 18th Century science.

Tags: disciplines, ethics, materialisms, mechanism, medicine, philosophy, physics, physiology, science

FR331: Introduction to French Civilization I, Final Project description

(This document is in French.) Although many of the topics offered for this project are pre-Enlightenment era, this project could easily be adapted to current topics. For this final project, students work in groups to create a newspaper (in paper or…

Tags: creative project, final project, newspaper assignment, upheavals

Places and Spaces of the Francophone World: Disasters

Places_and_Spaces_of_the_Francophone_World.pdf

An advanced French course that explores representations of disasters in sculpture, painting, literature, and film.

Tags: graduate course, landscape, syllabus, undergraduate course, upheavals

Environmental Issues in French and Francophone Literature

Français 589 Syllabus Spring 19 (1).pdf

This advanced French literature course explores environmental issues in three units that each consist of readings from both contemporary and historical periods. The first unit considers how the impact of environmental disaster or decline varies…

Tags: graduate course, landscape, syllabus, undergraduate course, upheavals

Tuer le mort. Le désir révolutionnaire

Tags: collective identity, destruction, revolution, sexuality, social reorganization

The Guillotine and the Terror

A very original if somewhat disturbing book on the imaginary of the French Revolution. Arasse, a historian of art, discusses the stories that were created about and around the guillotine. He shows how the machine was invested with the values and…

Tags: art, destruction, disciplines, revolution, science

Machine and Organism

Canguilhem inverts the normal scientific question--what is the mechanism underlying this organic process?--and asks how machines are organic. He traces the history of the relationships between organism and machine from the ancient Greek political…

Tags: biology, disciplines, history, materialism, mechanism, philosophy, politics, science

The Paradox of the Automaton: From Diderot to Cybernetics

A concise and provocative history of the idea of automata from Diderot to the present. She argues that the automaton is the cornerstone of modern knowledge and its powers.

Tags: disciplines, materialism, mechanism, philosophy, physics, science

Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings

Brings together a collection of Du Châtelet's writing and shows that she was much more than Voltaire's mistress; she was a philosophe in her own right. This volume not only provides a good introduction to Du Châtelet but shows how ambitious…

Tags: 18th century, disciplines, education, female author, gender, science

Emile, or on Education

Outlines a program for educating children according to the precepts of Nature. Heavily influenced by Locke's philosophy of human understanding, this 1762 treatise argues that parents should pursue a "negative education": avoid formal schooling and…

Tags: 18th century, citizenship, disciplines, education, gender, Locke, Rousseau, social reorganization

The Passions of the Soul

Although this work has been overshadowed in the history of philosophy by Descartes’s more famous Meditations, it contains his most mature and influential discussion of mental states (specifically emotions) as the object of scientific (specifically…

Tags: Descartes, disciplines, dualism, emotion, history of philosophy, history of psychology

“Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne.”

Tags: 18th century, disaster, enlightenment, Lisbon Earthquake, upheavals

Candide

Tags: 18th century, disaster, enlightenment, philosophy, upheavals

Les tremblements de terre aux xviie et xviiie siècles: la naissance d’un risque

Tags: catastrophe, disciplines, earthquakes, risk

L’invention de la catastrophe au xviiie siècle: du châtiment au désastre naturel

In the spirit of Starobinski's L'invention de la liberté, 1700-1789, essays in this edited volume consider the invention of "catastrophe" in the eighteenth century, i.e. the idea of catastrophe as a natural event and an aesthetic object was born in…

Tags: 18th century, catastrophe, disciplines, enlightenment, Europe, risk, upheavals

L’indisable et l’obscène : Flaubert, Sade et la loi. A propos de Bouvard et Pécuchet

Argues that Gustave Flaubert's unfinished satirical novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) is more transgressive in its un-making of the concept of law and order than in the works of his literary model Sade. According to Pellegrini, both authors attack the…

Tags: discpilines of knowledge, In-between, pornography, queer, sexuality, upheavals, violence

On the Shores of Politics [Au bords du politique]

Argues that political realism is a utopian belief and proposes that the true meaning of politics is based on the organization of dissent, or the righting of wrongs. Rancière offers "le politique" (the masculine form of a feminine noun - la politique)…

Tags: In-between, political philosophy, upheavals

Browse Items (18 total)