Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes
FAIN: FA-51501-05
Christopher Sheehan Braider
Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder (Boulder, CO 80303-1058)
A series of interdisciplinary readings in 17th-century French literature (Descartes, Molière, Pascal, Boileau) and art (Poussin, portrait painting) aimed at dislodging the conventional view that period culture was dominated by the figure known as the "Cartesian subject" and by the order of methodized rational representation supposed to define French classicism. By showing how the dualist picture of rational conscious autonomy was challenged in the period itself, the book develops a richer, more nuanced and, above all, non-reductive appreciation both of French classical culture and of the wider Western tradition that authorities like Foucault and Rorty take it to epitomize.
Associated Products
The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes (Book)Title: The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes
Abstract: Challenges the notion of the authority of the Cartesian picture of self as disembodied rational ego, showing instead how representative figures of the French 17th century including Descartes himself explored versions of identity shaped by Montaigne's sense of the primacy of experience. The book pursues this line of thought through close readings of the socio-economic circumstances surrounding the publication of Descartes's Meditations first in Latin (1641) and then in French (1647), of the multiple plays of individual minds informing Poussinian art, of the invention of authorial grandeur in Corneille's Médée, of Molière's critique of the classical theory of images and signs in Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire, of the Turing-like picture of mind developed in Pascalian science and apologetics, and of the self-deconstructing history of mind as the history of language in Boileau's Satire XII, "Sur l'Equivoque."
Year: 2012
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781442643482
Prizes
Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies
Date: 1/1/2013
Organization: Modern Language Association