Search results for "theory of judgement"

Why do Helvétius' writings matter? Rousseau's Notes sur De l'esprit

2016

International audience; De l’esprit was read and commented on by Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire, in 1758. So was De l’homme when it appeared posthumously in 1773. We will go into this series of books, marginalia, and refutations, to address the question: what exactly was widely discussed between the three authors during the 1750s? Is it ‘materialism’? Our first point is to interpret the potential distortions, re-workings or re-appropriations in Rousseau’s marginalia, known as Notes sur De l’esprit, especially here about the so-called theory of passive judgement. We will then see that there certainly is, in the discussion between Rousseau and Helvétius, a real opposition on the question of…