Victor Cousin Philosophical Fragments

by Antoine-Mahut, Delphine; Whistler, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780198866268
• ISBN10: 0198866267
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-05-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The first English translation of some of Victor Cousin's most important philosophical writings for over 150 years, accompanied by extensive contextual and analytic resources from a team of internationally recognized Cousin scholars.

Victor Cousin was a towering philosophical figure of the nineteenth century: no French philosopher since has fully escaped his shadow. This edition of Philosophical Fragments brings together a series of Cousin's most accessible and significant texts to introduce English-language readers to his thought, along with commentaries on his relationship to Cartesianism, his role in the invention of the historiography of philosophy, as well as his lasting institutional legacy.

The edition includes many of Cousin's most significant shorter pieces, such as his 1826 Preface to Philosophical Fragments, the 'manifesto' by means of which he relaunched the French spiritualist project and set out his own eclectic project in the history of philosophy; his 1833 Preface to Philosophical Fragments, in which he responds to mounting criticism of his version of spiritualism by setting out definitively his relations to Descartes, eighteenth-century sensualism, German Idealism, and Catholic theology; and a selection of the Fragments themselves, charting the genesis of his philosophy from the 1810s to the 1840s.

Author Biography

Delphine Antoine-Mahut, Professor of History of Modern Philosophy, École normale supérieure de Lyon,Daniel Whistler, Professor of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London

Since 2014, Delphine Antoine-Mahut has been Professor of History of Modern Philosophy at ENS de Lyon, having previously held positions as Assistant Professor in History of Modern Philosophy in the same Institution and as an upper-secondary school teacher (agrégée) in the Paris suburbs and French regions.

Daniel Whistler is Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously held positions as Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, Humboldt Fellow at the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität, Münster, and EURIAS Fellow at the École normale supérieure de Lyon.

Table of Contents

Editors' Preface: Victor Cousin, Eclectic Philosophy and its Legacies, Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Daniel WhistlerNote on Editions, Abbreviations, and TranslationsPart One: Introductions1. Cousin and French Philosophy, Delphine Antoine-Mahut2. Cousin and the Politics of Philosophy, Félix Barancy and Sarah Bernard-Granger3. Cousin and the History of Philosophy, Pierre-François Moreau4. Cousin and the Eighteenth Century, Lucie Rey5. Cousin and the Problem of Metaphysics, Daniel WhistlerPart Two: TextsThe Three Prefaces6. Preface to the 1826 Edition of Philosophical Fragments7. Preface to the 1833 Edition of Philosophical Fragments8. Prefatory Note to the 1838 Edition of Philosophical Fragments1816-18189. On the Moral Law and Freedom10. On the True Meaning of the cogito, ergo sum11. Attempt at a Classification of Philosophical Questions and Schools12. On the Fact of Consciousness13. On the Clear and the Obscure in Knowledge, or On Spontaneity and Reflection14. On Real Beauty and Ideal Beauty1826-183015. The True Beginning of the History of Philosophy16. Plato: Language of the Theory of Ideas17. Plato18. Prefatory Note to New Philosophical Fragments19. Preface to the Translation of Tennemann's Manual of the History of Philosophy20. From Review of Reiffenberg's On EclecticismAfter 183321. Introduction to the Posthumous Works of Maine de Biran22. From Abelard23. From Foreword to On Pascal's Pensées24. Foreword to Fragments of Cartesian PhilosophyAppendix: Two Edicts Issued by the Royal Council of Public Education