Del i serien Re-inventing Philosophy as a Way of Life

The Reception of Ancient Philosophers in Early Modern France

The Mask of Philosophy

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

AvJiani Fan,Keith Ansell-Pearson,Michael Ure,Daniel Conway

1 799 kr

Kommande

Offering a ground-breaking examination of how major French thinkers of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries addressed the profound intellectual and spiritual crises of their age, this book moves beyond traditional intellectual history to argue that early modern French literature did not merely transmit ancient ideas but actively engaged in a critical dialogue with them.At its core, the book consists of focused case studies on the appropriation of ancient philosophical schools as a way of life, including Socratic, Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, Cynic, and Skeptic traditions, in Early Modern French literature. Jiani Fan argues that these French authors used parody, irony, and literary innovation as tools to dismantle classical systems and, in many cases, to clear a path for new Christian, skeptical, or scientific worldviews.We are guided through Michel de Montaigne’s evolution from an Epicurean interest in Lucretian clinamen as a model for free will toward a fideist skepticism that rejects philosophical inquiry in favor of divine revelation. Fan then analyzes how the moralists La Rochefoucauld and Pascal deconstructed the classical ideal of douceur (sweetness), exposing it not as a marker of Ciceronian humanitas but as a subtle instrument of the Augustinian libido dominandi, a tyrannical flattery that enslaves through pleasure rather than reason. Another central chapter investigates Pascal’s ingenious portrayal of Plato and Aristotle as honnêtes hommes, courtly figures who employ Socratic irony and Pyrrhonian doubt not in a pure search for truth but as a political strategy to manage the vanity of princes.At its conclusion, this book explores the Enlightenment’s culmination of this critical tradition in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, where the ancient Cynic practice of parrhêsia (frank speech) degenerates into a modern, cynical performance, an “enlightened false consciousness” that reflects the disillusionment of a failed ideal.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-10-29
Mått156 x 234 x 12 mm
Vikt323 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieRe-inventing Philosophy as a Way of Life
Antal sidor224
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN9781350630895

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Jiani Fan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, specialising in French literature and philosophy, German literature and philosophy, and Classics. She is the author of The Reception of Ancient Philosophy in Early Modern France (Bloomsbury, 2026), Between Shanshui and Landscape: Toward a Comparative Aesthetics of Chinese and Western Poetry and Visual Arts (2026) and is currently completing a third book titled Nietzsche the Moralist: Moral Psychology and the French Moralists.

IntroductionPart One: The Genealogy of Reception 1. The Genealogy of Appropriation: Ancient Philosophy in Early Modern FrancePart Two: Ancient Philosophy and the Formation of the World in the Renaissance2. From Epicurean Liberum Arbitrium to Fideist Revelation: Montaigne’s Vision of Free Will and Natural Law Part Three: The Disenchantment and Reconstruction of Ancient Moral Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century3. Pascal and La Rochefoucauld on Epicurean and Augustinian Douceur4. La Rochefoucauld’s Psychological Dissection: Unmasking Senecan Stoicism in the Maximes5. “Se moquer de la philosophie est vraiment philosopher”: Plato, Aristotle, and the Pedagogy of Irony and Play in Pascal’s PenséesPart Four: Intellectual Echoes of the Scientific Revolution6. From an Enclosed Universe to the Cartesian Vortex: The Literary Representation of the Universe in Pascal, La Fontaine, and FontenellePart Five: The Perverted Modern Cynic in the Enlightenment7. A Modern Cynic’s Parrhêsia and Enlightened False Consciousness in Diderot’s Le Neveu de RameauEpilogue: Postclassicisms in Early Modern French Literature and IdeasBibliographyIndex

It is rare to have a scholar with such depth of knowledge in the ancient and vernacular languages of Europe, rarer to have such breadth of knowledge of Western intellectual history, and rarest to have both join forces to produce a work of this staggering erudition. With calm authority and elegant equipoise, Jiani Fan presents to us the grateful readers a masterclass on the genesis of modern intellectual thought. The “mask” that she exposes is that the disenchanted guise of modernity obscures its deep indebtedness to the ancient philosophies of Christianity, Stoicism, and Epicureanism.