Diderot's Counterpoints: The Dynamics of Contrariety in His Major Works (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,)

Walter E. Rex

ISBN 10: 0729406202 / ISBN 13: 9780729406208

Editore: Voltaire Foundation, 1998

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Unread. Author was the previous owner of this book. It was part of a collection of over 800 books that once belonged to Prof. Rex. Prof. Walter E. Rex (1927-2010), Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of California, Berkeley. In 1975, Prof. Rex was offered for the first time, together with Professor Daniel Heartz of the Music Department, an interdisciplinary course on music and literature in the French 18th century (especially concerned with Rousseau and Diderot). A brilliant cellist, Rex was known on occasion to play musical examples for the students in the class on his cello. This course and its successor (a course on Mozart and Beaumarchais, again taught with Professor Heartz) would become legendary on campus. DJ with light shelf wear.

Codice articolo 3006371

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Diderot's Counterpoints: The Dynamics of Contrariety in His Major Works (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,)
• Editore: Voltaire Foundation
• Data di pubblicazione: 1998
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0729406202
• ISBN 13: 9780729406208
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Condizione: Very Good
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: Very Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

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.