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Natural Law (in Rousseau’s philosophy) [ Political & Moral philosophy ]

… si mal sur le sens du mot Loi, il serait bien difficile de convenir d’une bonne définition de la loi naturelle’, écrit Rousseau dans le Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes . La réfutation de la loi … de l’historicité humaine, bouleverse le fondement du lien social. Concepts > Political & Moral philosophy Keywords Rousseau natural law positive law social bond social contract Selon Rousseau, le lien social n’a rien d’une évidence, et il n’est parfait qu’à condition de supprimer toute dépendance …

Pierre-Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos [ Art and Literature / Association ]

… an indispensable complement to it. His eclectic body of work paints the picture of a reformer, an educationalist in the Rousseauian tradition, a spare-time literary critic and an author of courtly poems, inspired by his visits to the salons. … , 1 Les Liaisons dangereuses (published in English as Dangerous Liaisons or Dangerous Connections ) was indebted to Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Richardson’s Clarissa and simultaneously marked the pinnacle and decline of a genre … dangereuses , Laclos drew attention to the instructive nature of novels and established a filiation between Richardson, Rousseau and himself. Above all he highlighted the importance of Cecilia for the model of sociability that he …

William Godwin (and his diary) [ Philosophy / Politics / Political & Moral philosophy / Feelings & Emotions / Diaries & Letters ]

… practice his vocation he found his religious beliefs evaporating under the influence of the philosophes he read – mainly Rousseau, Holbach and Helvetius. He moved to London and sought to support himself by his writing. After a precarious … himself. He saw himself as a philosopher, and a central feature of his philosophical outlook, profoundly influenced by Rousseau, was a disdain for the false manners and decorum of ‘society’ and the world of fashion. From this perspective, …

Menageries [ Sports & Leisure / Politics & Society / Social interaction ]

… zebra became a socio-cultural phenomenon attracting the attention of such eminent philosophers and writers as Voltaire, Rousseau, Walpole, the Rev. William Mason, the poet William Wallbeck and many others. In particular, Voltaire, while describing the English people to Rousseau, mentioned that they love to amuse themselves with ‘oddities of any kind’, 3  that is to say with such exotic … sociable purposes of the horse: 3 . François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, A Letter from Mr. Voltaire to Mr. Jean Jacques Rousseau (London: Payne, 1766), p. 35. 4 . ‘William Mason to Horace Walpole, 2 June 1773’, in Warren Hunting Smith and …

Erasmus Darwin [ Science / Art and Literature / Philosophy ]

… used the image of the social chain several times as well as the metaphor of weaving to describe it. However, contrary to Rousseau, according to whom man is born free, but is in fetters everywhere ( The Social Contract ), this social chain is … network of sociability extended far beyond the boundaries of the British Isles: Erasmus Darwin had met Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his works were read by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who was the author of a pioneering work of transformism in …