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French thinkers have revolutionized European thought about knowledge, religion, politics, and society. Delivering a comprehensive history of thought in France from the Middle Ages to the present, this book follows themes and developments of thought across the centuries. It provides readers with studies of both systematic thinkers and those who operate less systematically, through essays or fragments, and places them all in their many contexts. Informed by up-to-date research, these accessible chapters are written by prominent experts in their fields who investigate key concepts in non-technical language. Chapters feature treatments of specific thinkers as individuals including Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes and Derrida, but also more general movements and schools of thought from humanism to liberalism, via the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and feminism. Furthermore, the influence of gender, race, empire and slavery are investigated to offer a broad and fulfilling account of French thought throughout the ages.
List of contents
Introduction Michael Moriarty; Part I. The Middle Ages to 1789: 1. Medieval French thought David Luscombe; 2. Humanist culture in Renaissance France Ingrid De Smet; 3. Reformers and dissidents Neil Kenny; 4. Rabelais John O'Brien; 5. Moral theories: Aristotelianism and Neostoicism Ullrich Langer; 6. Pyrrhonism John O'Brien; 7. Ramus Raphaële Garrod; 8. Montaigne John O'Brien; 9. Demonology Timothy Chesters; 10. Political and legal thought Sophie E. B. Nichols; 11. Linguistic and literary thought: mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries John D. Lyons; 12. French scholastics in the seventeenth century Roger Ariew; 13. Sceptics and freethinkers Isabelle Moreau; 14. Descartes Gary Hatfield; 15. Augustinianism Michael Moriarty; 16. Spirituality Richard Parish; 17. Pascal Emma Gilby; 18. Cartesianism Steven Nadler; 19. Bayle Ruth Whelan; 20. Ethical, political, and social thought Michael Moriarty; 21. Aesthetics: ancients and moderns Richard Scholar; 22. The querelle des femmes Rebecca Wilkin; 23. The Enlightenment Jenny Mander; 24. Voltaire John Leigh; 25. Diderot Marian Hobson; 26. Rousseau Michael Moriarty; 27. Philosophy and religion: deism, atheism, materialism Caroline Warman; 28. Enlightenment political and social thought A. M. R. De Dijn; 29. The continent of history David McCallam; 30. Enlightenment aesthetic thought Kate E. Tunstall; 31. The Enlightenment and gender Judith Still; 32. Colonialism and slavery Jenny Mander; Part II. From 1789 to the Present Day: 33. French thought on the eve of the Revolution and after Jeremy Jennings; 34. Political thought in the nineteenth century Jeremy Jennings; 35. The Paris School of liberal political economy David Hart; 36. Romanticism Alison Finch; 37. Victor Cousin and eclecticism Benjamin Bacle; 38. Nineteenth-century religious thought Robert Priest; 39. Auguste Comte and positivism Mary Pickering; 40. Race and empire in ninteenth-century France Emmanuelle Saada; 41. Philosophy: epistemological debates and Bergson Daniela S. Barberis; 42. Nation and nationalism Michael Sutton; 43. Twentieth-century French Catholic thought Michael Sutton; 44. Writing modern French history Philip Whalen; 45. Sartre and the art of living with paradox Thomas R. Flynn; 46. Marxism versus humanism Knox Peden; 47. French feminist thought in the twentieth century Diana Holmes; 48. Anticolonialism Emile Chabal; 49. The new liberalism Daniel J. Mahoney; 50. Michel Foucault Michael C. Behrent; 51. Jacques Derrida and deconstruction Paul Rekret; 52. Sociology Daniela S. Barberis; 53. Literary theory Patrick French; Conclusion: the end of French thought? Jeremy Jennings.
