Article ID: CBB756812252

The French Enlightenment Attempts to Create a Philosophy Without Reason: The Case of Diderot and the Effect of Helvétius (2018)

unapi

It is a well-worn, yet astonishingly resilient, cliché that the Enlightenment was the “Age of Reason”. By focusing on Diderot and Helvétius this paper shows that, rather than proceeding in the name of reason, key figures within the progressive philosophy of the French Enlightenment were in fact extremely suspicious of abstract reasoning and attempted to construct a philosophy which purged the faculty of reason entirely from its philosophical anthropology and reduced the mind’s functions to the single faculty of sensation and so to the passions. It is in this sense that philosophy of the French Enlightenment attempted to produce a philosophy without reason. This paper reconstructs this attempt. In doing so it again engages critically with the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dogmatically rationalist, it provides a historical case study of a period in which philosophy pushed against the limits of its own identity, and it uses this attempt to reflect on the mythological not historiographical service which the cliché of Enlightenment Reason plays for the philosophical identity.

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Authors & Contributors
Brewer, Daniel
Meghan K. Roberts
Didier Contadini
Jared Holley
Giovanni Cristiani
Bow, Charles Bradford
Concepts
Philosophy
Moral philosophy
Reason
Materialism
Encyclopedias (history)
Natural philosophy
Time Periods
18th century
Enlightenment
17th century
Places
France
Scotland
Europe
Institutions
Société Typographique de Londres
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