The Reception of Ancient Philosophers in Early Modern France

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.